MONTAIGNE 



" PIONEERS IN EDUCATION" 

An important series of six volumes, of value 
to every student of pedagogy 

By GABRIEL COMPAYRE 
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J. J. ROUSSEAU 

And Education by Nature 

HERBERT SPENCER 

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HERBART 

And Education by Instruction 

MONTAIGNE 

And Education of the Judgment 

HORACE MANN 

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MONTAIGNE. 
From a portrait in the "Depot Des Archives du Royaume" at Paris. 



PIONEERS IN EDUCATION 

MONTAIGNE 

AND EDUCATION OF THE JUDGMENT 

BY 

GABRIEL COMPAYRE 

CORRESPONDENT OF THE INSTITUTE ; DIRECTOR OF THE ACADEMY 

OF LYONS; AUTHOR OF "PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO 

EDUCATION," "LECTURES ON PEDAGOGY," 

"A HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY," ETC. 



TRANSLATED BY 
J. E. MANSION 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 



|L|BnARYofO 

' Two Copies Kecejr .. 

APR 8 1908 



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Copyright, 1908, 
By THOMAS T. CROWELL & COMPANY. 



Published, April, 1908. 



CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 

PAGE 

Preface xi 

I. Montaigne's Character 

The character and general ideas of Montaigne. — That 
by his ideas, taken as a whole, he was one of the edu- 
cators of the French mind. — Sketch of his life. — 
History of his mind. — Contrasts and contradic- 
tions. — Nothing exemplary about him, either as a 
husband or as a father. — On the other hand, he was 
a devoted son and a loving friend. — Montaigne and 
Etienne de la Boetie. — Montaigne's friendly piety. 
— What we are to think of his heart. — Motives for 
which he withdrew within his castle (1570). — His 
public life. — Montaigne mayor of Bordeaux (1581- 
1585). — His "languid fondness" for business. — 
The plague in Bordeaux (1585). — He does not 
wash his hands of contemporary events. — His atti- 
tude amidst factions. — His dealings with the po- 
litical men of his time. — Relative neutrality and 
absolute independence. — His political loyalty. — 
His relations with the king of Navarre. — His pro- 
fessed contempt for human nature. — Judgments 
on his contemporaries. — His narrow views on the 
moral and intellectual worth of women. — He con- 
tradicts himself, and does them justice. — Mile, de 
Gournay, his "daughter of alliance." — Montaigne 
lived chiefly in the society of books. — His abun- 



vi CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 



dant reading. — His preference for poets, historians, 
and moralists. — Curiosity one of the distinctive 
characteristics of his mind. — The Diary of his Ital- 
ian journey. — Montaigne's alleged laziness. — 
Wherein he was an egotist. — Extreme need of inde- 
pendence. — Some little vanity. — Why he spoke of 
himself at such length. — He studies mankind while 
he studies himself. — Montaigne's moderation. — 
He spares his will. — And yet is not unacquainted 
with vigorous hatred. — His invectives against 
medicine and doctors. — Indecision of his fluctuat- 
ing and ever varying thought. — Inconsistency of 
his character. — A certain frivolity. — His lessons 
to old age. — He has no fear of death. — Montaigne 
and Pascal. — Did he believe in immortality ? — 
Montaigne's religion. — Outward submission to the 
dogmas and practices of the Roman Catholic church. 
— At heart, little faith, and a kind of scepticism. — 
The Genius of Paganism. — Montaigne is a ration- 
alist. — His ethical doctrine is based on conscience 
and reason. — His motto : "What do I know?" 

k II. Montaigne's Pedagogy. 

His pedagogy was not for the people. — The " Institu- 
tion of Children," a plan of castle education, with 
a few general views. — The potency of education is 
limited. — Action of heredity and of natural incli- 
nations. — Criticism of the education of his day. — 
Campaign against pedantry, — against scholasti- 
cism. —""Reaction against the Middle Ages. — Edu- 
cation should be broad, and human. — Neither a 
grammarian nor a logician, but a man. — The culti- 
vation of judgment. — In what different senses 
Montaigne takes the word "judgment." — To judge 



CONTENTS AND SUMMARY vii 



is to think for oneself: it is to think rightly; 
it is to be fit to act rightly. — Criticism of instruc- 
tion based purely on memory. — Knowledge should 
be assimilated. — Rectitude of the mind. — A head 
well trained rather than well filled. — Judgment 
the possession of a critical mind. — Moral judgment. 

— All studies subordinated to the teaching of ethics. 

— What profit did Montaigne himself derive from 
the cultivation of judgment? — Montaigne's prac- 
tical pedagogy. — By what means should judgment 
be cultivated ? — Initiative left to the child. — 
Appeal to personal reflection. — Few formal lessons. 
Observation and experience. — The frequentation 
of men. — Observation of things. — Books. — How 
they should be read. — That they should busy, not 
the memory, but the judgment. — Study of moral 
philosophy. — It is accessible to the youngest chil- 
dren. — Practical apprenticeship to virtue. — Medita- 
tion and self-communion. — "Hold on to yourself." 

— Contradictions of Montaigne on the defini- 
tion of moral conduct and of virtue. — Epicurean- 
ism and stoicism. — Of pleasant and easy virtue, 
along roads easy to tread. — Of stern virtue, along 
rugged paths. — No well-defined plan of studies. — 
We must wait until the judgment is formed, to be- 
gin to study on special lines. — Montaigne is apt to 
somewhat undervalue science. — He shakes off the 
yoke of Latinism. — Latin had been his mother 
tongue. — And yet he concludes that it is better to 
begin by studying French, and even foreign modern 
languages. — Little grammar. — Montaigne's rheto- 
ric. — Physical education. — Health is the most 
valuable of man's assets. — Hardening of the body. 

— What school discipline ought to be. — No cor- 



viii CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 



poral punishment. — A mild severity. — The edu- 
cation of women. — His mean and narrow views. — 
What Montaigne lacked : love for children. — He 
does not love them until they have grown up. — 
Montaigne lacking in feeling for the beauties of 
nature. — His attitude towards art. — The educa- 
tion he advocates is rather superficial, strikes an aver- 
age, "a la francaise" 60 

III. Montaigne's Influence. 

What is modern in his ideas. — Extraordinary success 
of the Essays. — Montaigne founded a pedagogical £, 
school : Locke, Rousseau, etc. — Sainte-Beuve, and 
Montaigne's funeral train. — We must include some 
foreigners, Byron, Emerson, Nietzsche. — The ideas 
of Montaigne forestalled those of Pascal, Fenelon, 
etc. — His style one of the elements of his success. 

— Montaigne is original, in spite of his borrowings 
from the ancients. — He had little faith in progress. 

— And yet he prepared it. — His prophetic views. — 
He is interested in mechanical arts. — Other novel- 
ties. — Enlightened patriotism. — He sings the 
praises of Paris. — His method of reasoning. — He 
is the promoter of introspective psychology and of 
the observation of the conscious self. — He touched 
on most pedagogical questions with a modern out- 
look. — Though an innovator in pedagogy, he is a 
conservative in politics. — And yet occasionally 
speaks a revolutionary language. — Interview with 
notable Americans. — What he thinks of the Span- 
ish methods of conquest. — Shakespeare copies him 
in a passage of The Tempest. — His tendency to 
praise primitive life and natural law. — His admira- 
tion for the sturdy souls of the people. — Peasants. 



CONTENTS AND SUMMARY ix 



— He ascribes too much to "fortune," i.e. to exte- 
rior circumstances. — He does not allow enough for 
the exercise of the human will. — What he would 
have thought of the success of his book, and of 
his critics. — Guizot and Guillaume Guizot. — Dr. 
Payen. — Mr Griin. — Mr. Edme Champion. — 
Mr. Emile Faguet 104 

Bibliography 137 







PREFACE 

« Everything has been said regarding Montaigne, 
and to wish to speak of him again requires some 
boldness. Yet it is impossible to deny him, in our 
gallery of " Pioneers in Education," the place to 
which he has a right. 

No doubt he gave us only a sketch. He did not 
go deeply into the problem of education; but he 
was full of its importance, and reverts to it con- 
tinually in many a chapter of the Essays. 

He is in no way a dogmatic theorist. In all 
things he is a dilettante. He idled along through 
the world of ideas, with the marvellous resources 
of his erudition, with the impulsive raciness of a 
keen and original mind. He " tickled" himself, 
as he says, with his imaginings. But in the matter 
of education he shows unaccustomed gravity, and 
this is certainly the subject on which he varied 
least.- On how many pedagogical questions has he 
not left some deep or epigrammatic utterance, and 
of quite modern tendency? 



xii PREFACE 

He founded a school of pedagogy to which belong, 
whatever evil they may have spoken of him, the 
Recluses of Port-Royal, the mild Fenelon, the wise 
Locke, and even the revolutionist Rousseau. And 
that school is the school of common sense, the school 
which subordinates instruction to education, mem- 
ory to judgment, science to conscience, and all 
studies to ethical teaching. "If the child's soul is 
not put into better trim, I would as soon see him 
playing tennis as studying." 

The Essays, explored though they have been by 
a host of commentators, are an inexhaustible mine 
of impressions and ideas. The task of extracting 
the marrow therefrom is an endless one. We have 
drawn from them with full hands, and it is by quo- 
tations especially that we shall attempt to reproduce 
the features of Montaigne's moral physiognomy, 
and to define his views on education. Some of these 
may appear commonplace; they were not so in 
his day. Wrapt in an enchanting style, they have 
not aged; "they still smile to the reader in their 
fresh novelty." 

Besides, there is some interest in opposing the 
ideas of a sixteenth-century educator to those which 
are current to-day. Lastly, let us add that, as time 
flows on and opinions change, the same book is 
interpreted in different ways by those who read it. 



PREFACE xiii 

In a certain sense it becomes new and different 
when consciences animated by a new spirit cast 
their light upon it. The Essays are like a landscape, 
the aspect of which changes with the different 
hours of the day, according to the light which falls 
upon it, but which is ever pleasant to look upon, 
in the variety of its successive and ever changing 
appearances. 



MONTAIGNE 



Montaigne's Character 

Montaigne is not an educationist solely because 
he has sketched offhand a plan for the education 
of children. He is one also — and perhaps most 
of all — by the action which his ideas taken as a 
whole have exercised for three centuries on his in- 
numerable readers. There is no book the influence 
of which has made so deep a mark, for better or for 
worse, on the French mind, as that of the Essays. 
How many precepts of Montaigne's have passed 
into our everyday wisdom, and form a part of our 
moral inheritance ! " Should not the Essays, that 
moral biography in which a man of extraordinary 
intelligence lays himself bare in all the variety of 
his feelings, be considered as a book for the educa- 
tion of all men? While he draws his own likeness 
with absolute sincerity, "from head to foot," with 
a directness at times shameless, in his " hunger" 
to reveal himself, "probing the inner man to the 
very bowels," no more discreet regarding his faults 

l 



2 MONTAIGNE 

than regarding his qualities, Montaigne, on many 
a point, offers us examples, and gives us rules of 
conduct by which the man of the world of all times 
may profit. And this moralist has all the more in- 
fluence on men's minds in that he lays no claim to 
impose his thought upon them. He does not preach ; 
he does not even give advice ; but he works his way 
into the imagination of all those that study him ; he 
envelops them by his vigour and strength, and also 
by the happy grace of his deep or witty utterances. 
He by no means poses as a model of virtue, be 
it either Christian or pagan: "I am neither an 
angel nor a Cato." He has escaped neither the 
passions nor the weaknesses of common men. But, 
through the very acknowledgment of his moral 
backslidings, which he owns to so frequently in a 
book a large part of which might just as well have 
for title the Memoirs or Confessions of Montaigne, 
he believes that he is accomplishing a useful work. 
By showing how not to do it, so to speak, he hopes 
to cure the faults of his fellow-men, as he lays bare 
his own. "It will profit others," he says, "to avoid 
imitating me. . . ." — "There is more instruction 
to be had from the avoidance of evil examples than 
from the imitation of those that are good." And 
again: "Wise men can learn more from fools than 
fools from wise men. . . ." 



MONTAIGNE 3 

He studiously disclaims any pretensions to dog- 
matize: "This is no doctrine, but merely my own 
fancies, shapeless and tentative," — elsewhere he 
will call them "the bees in my bonnet." And yet 
he occasionally hints that his writings are imme- 
diately concerned with the amelioration of man- 
kind, and that by some of his reflections at least he 
is working for the amelioration of his fellows. 
"How many times, when angry at some action 
which civility prohibited me from reproving openly, 
I have given vent to my feelings in these pages, not 
without some purpose of educating the public!" 

Before expounding Montaigne's special views on 
education properly so-called, let us then read the Es- 
says through again ; let us renew acquaintance with 
the man, such as he has painted himself, and with the 
general tendencies of his mind. Let us tell what 
he was, and what he thought. In short, let us give a 
sketch of his character, and glance at his philosophy. 

It is unnecessary to review in detail his unevent- 
ful life. 1 It would take too long to collect in this 

1 Montaigne was born at the castle of Montaigne, in Pengord, 
on the 28th of February, 1533. He died there on the 13th of 
September, 1592, of the quinsy. He entered the "College de 
Guyenne" in 1539, at the age of six, and left it in 1546. In 1555, 
at the age of twenty-two, he was appointed councillor at the Cour 
des Aides of Perigueux; then, in 1557, councillor at the Parliament 
of Bordeaux. He resigned this office in 1570, and spent the 



4 MONTAIGNE 

place the results of the researches which the curious 
have directed to every nook and cranny of his 
existence, — to his ancestry, his friendships, his castle 
of Montaigne, and even the nature of his physical 
infirmities; in a word, to everything relating ever 
so remotely to this interesting personality. Every- 
thing has been rummaged and ferreted out. And 
yet one of the men who in our day has made the 
closest study and acquired the most intimate know- 
ledge of the circumstances of Montaigne's life, who 
spent thirty years in gathering material for a com- 
prehensive work which remained unfinished, Dr. 
Payen, wrote, in 1851, that 'Ho write his biography 
was as yet an impossible task." * 

There still remain, indeed, some obscure points 
in his life, in particular what became of him when 
in 1546, at the age of thirteen, he had ended his 
school studies at the College de Guyenne, at Bor- 
deaux. It is supposed that he then studied law, 
probably at Toulouse, but this is not certain. 

If the external history of Montaigne's life raises 

remainder of his life in retirement in his castle, leaving his retreat 
only to be mayor of Bordeaux from 1581 to 1585, and to visit 
Italy (1580-1581). — The first two books of the Essays appeared 
in 1580, and the third book in 1588. 

1 Dr. Payen published between 1846 and 1870 a series of mono- 
graphs on Montaigne. He bequeathed to the Bibliotheque Na- 
tionale more than 1500 works relating to his favourite author. 



MONTAIGNE 5 

a few questions which have not yet been solved, it 
seems as though the history of his soul should be 
easy to write. Of a man who described himself with 
so much complacency, who said, "I dare not only 
to speak of myself, but to speak only of myself," 
how is it possible that critics have not yet succeeded 
in drawing a portrait which may be accepted as 
final? How can they be so utterly at variance in 
their judgments of him? According to some, Mon- 
taigne is a sceptic, an Epicurean, a selfish egotist, 
an idler; according to others, he is a rationalist, 
a Stoic, a man of a large heart, and a lover of work. 
Whom shall we believe? All of these critics per- 
haps ; for in his ever fluctuating thoughts and tastes, 
Montaigne was at once each and every one of these. 
He is an ever changing Proteus, of whom it might 
be said, as Fenelon did of Alcibiades, that "he 
assumes the most contrary forms." Did not his 
friend La Boetie say to him: "You are an Alci- 
biades"? Was not Montaigne thinking of his 
own character when he declared that "the most 
beautiful souls are those which show most variety 
and flexibility"? He escapes every attempt at 
classification. He is not the man of one exclusive 
form; no one system holds him in bondage. He 
unites in his rich nature the most opposite quali- 
ties. And it is precisely those ever recurring con- 



6 MONTAIGNE 

trasts of his elusive and changeful character which 
partly explain the contradictions of his numer- 
ous critics. 

It is one of the ironies, and so to speak a mockery, 
of the history of education in France, that some of 
the men whom we appeal to, and with good reason, 
for the highest lessons in pedagogy, were not them- 
selves educationists by profession, and did not per- 
sonally practise the art of which they laid down the 
principles. Nay! They took no care to bring up 
their own children and conscientiously to fulfil their 
paternal duties. J. J. Rousseau handed over his 
sons and daughters to the tender mercies of the 
foundlings' hospitals. Montaigne did not show 
himself an unnatural father to the same degree, but 
he is at least to be blamed in this, that he bore very 
lightly the loss of four of his daughters, who died in 
their infancy: "They all die at nurse, . . ." he 
says. 

What are we to think of a father who, more of an 
author than of a father, would rather have written 
a fine book than live again in his children? "The 
offspring of our mind lie closer to our hearts. There 
are few men given to poetry who would not be prouder 
to be the fathers of the JEneid than of the finest boy 
in Rome." With a flippancy which is surely in 
bad taste, Montaigne affects not to remember exactly 



MONTAIGNE 7 

how many children he has lost. 1 "I lost two or 
three children, not without regret, but without 
grieving." Did he at least interest himself in the 
education of the daughter who remained to him? 
No. "She has been brought up by her mother," 
he says, " privately and in retirement. ... I 
interfere in no way with her mother's authority. 
Feminine rule has mysterious ways of its own, and 
must be left to women. ..." 

If he was too careless a father to condescend to 
interest himself in shaping the mind of his only 
daughter, he would seem to have shown the same 
indifference as a husband, and to have kept his wife 
rather far from his thoughts and his heart. What 
he especially required of her was that she should 
have the virtues of a good housekeeper. 

"I require of a married woman, above all other 
virtues, an understanding of domestic economy. . . . 
The most useful and honourable science and occupa- 
tion of the mother of a family is the science of 
housekeeping. It angers me to see, in several 

1 One is all the more surprised at this somewhat flippant decla- 
ration, as Montaigne noted down very exactly all family events 
in a copy of Beuthers's Ephemerides, which has been found. We 
gather from it that his daughter Leonor, the only one who lived, 
was born in 1571; she was his second child. In 1574 and 1577, 
he makes notes of the birth of a fourth and of a fifth daughter, 
and in 1583, of a sixth daughter, all of whom, like two of those 
who had preceded them, died when scarcely a few months old. 



8 MONTAIGNE 

homes, the husband return, dull and dejected through 
the worries of business, towards midday, to find 
his wife still dressing her hair and titivating in her 
private apartment." 

Montaigne admits that he was not intended for 
married life, for what he lightly calls the " vulgar 
pleasures" of wedlock. He had married Frangoise 
de la Chassaigne in 1565, at the age of thirty-two, 
to conform to custom, and to please his parents, 
rather than through natural inclination. He was 
personally so little disposed to marry that he writes, 
in whimsical mood: "Of my own free will, I should 
have got out of marrying Wisdom herself, had she 
been anxious to have me!" 

No doubt he will say of marriage that it is " a wise 
bargain," "one of the finest of the component 
parts of society"; but this legal institution receives 
no share of Montaigne's heart. He lays down as 
a principle that love, true love, cannot exist between 
husband and wife: "A good marriage, if there are 
any such, declines to keep company with love." 
Thus we should speak no more of conjugal love, but 
at the very most of conjugal friendship. 1 

If Montaigne offers nothing exemplary, far from 
it, as a husband or as a father, he was, on the other 

'He has dared write without circumlocution: "The great 
Cato like ourself was tired of his wife." 



MONTAIGNE 9 

hand, a model son, and a hero in friendship. He 
speaks but little of his mother, it is true, although he 
spent his whole life beside her. 1 But he worshipped 
his father. 2 With what pious veneration he speaks 
of him, after losing him in 1568! . . . "The good 
father whom God gave me, who got nothing from 
me except gratitude for his kindness, but that, 
truly, of the liveliest. ..." Montaigne's filial 
piety manifests itself in acts of touching delicacy. 
He nearly always dressed in black and in white, in 
memory of his father's ways. He liked to use, to 
cover himself with his father's old cloak, because it 
seemed to him that he thus "wrapped himself up 
in him." But he was especially anxious to continue 
his father's traditions, to treasure his moral inheri- 
tance, to obey him still, although he was dead: 
"It is my proud boast that my father's will is still 
alive and active within me." 

But it was especially in his affection for Etienne 
de la Boetie, the author of the famous pamphlet, 
On Voluntary Servitude, that Montaigne showed 
of what warmth of feeling his heart was capable. 

1 Montaigne's mother, Antoinette de Louppes, of Spanish, 
and probably of Jewish extraction, survived her son, and did 
not die until ten years after him, on the 4th of April, 1601. 

2 Montaigne's father, originally a tradesman, had been en- 
nobled, and had given up commerce for a military career. He 
followed Francis I into Italy. He was successively jurat, or magis- 
trate, provost, and mayor of Bordeaux. 



10 MONTAIGNE 

Read once again the admirable letter which he wrote 
to his father on the death of his friend, and also that 
divine chapter in the Essays which he has devoted 
to Friendship. Never has any one spoken in such 
moving terms of the love which may unite two 
souls, so entirely that "they obliterate and can no 
longer find the seam which joined them." Never 
did any love song, in its most ardent effusions, equal 
this hymn to Friendship. "If I should be urged 
to tell why I loved him, I feel that my only answer 
can be : 'Because it was he, because he was myself.' " 
Never did human souls mingle and blend in a more 
intimate or a closer embrace. It was a universal 
fusion and "commixture, which having seized all 
my will, induced the same to plunge and lose itself 
in his; which likewise having seized all his will, 
brought it to lose and plunge itself in mine, with a 
mutual greediness and with a like concurrence. . . ." 
A La Rochefoucauld would perhaps say that self- 
esteem, mutual admiration, the personal satisfac- 
tion of finding one's self appreciated and understood, 
played their part in this burning and passionate 
friendship. What does it matter, if from this blend 
of inferior motives there arises, in all its purity, the 
flame of a sincere affection, ready for any self- 
sacrifice? When La Boetie was first struck down 
by the illness which was to carry him off at the age 



MONTAIGNE 11 

of thirty-three, — the age at which Pascal died, — 
he gave his friend to understand that his disease 
might be infectious, and advised him therefore to 
keep away, and to come and see him only occasion- 
ally, for a few short moments. . . . How did Mon- 
taigne act? "From that hour," he says, "I never 
left him. . . ." * 

Montaigne's friendship for La Boetie was the great 
passion of his life. It was "a whole-hearted and 
perfect" friendship, "one and indivisible," each one 
giving himself up so entirely to his friend that 
"there remained nothing to him to bestow else- 
where"; an exclusive friendship which caused Mon- 
taigne to turn with loathing from all other "vulgar 
and common friendships"; it was like a first love, 
when, the soul having surrendered itself entirely, 
the fountain springs of the heart seem to have 
dried up for life. Montaigne, to be sure, was ac- 
quainted with other feelings than that of friendship. 
In somewhat free and crude terms he makes us the 

1 La Boetie died on the 18th of August, 1563, of dysentery. Born 
at Sarlat in 1530, he was three years older than Montaigne. Ap- 
pointed Councillor at the Parliament of Bordeaux in 1552, he had 
Montaigne for a colleague from 1557, and it was there that they 
formed their close friendship, founded on a perfect community of 
feelings. Nothing indeed could be further from the truth than to 
write : " How could these two friends think so differently while 
they loved each other so closely ? " (Combes, Study on the political 
ideas of Montaigne and of La Boetie.) 



12 MONTAIGNE 

confidants of the love affairs of which he had more 
than one in his youth. But "there was no part he 
could play so well as that of a friend;" and he does 
not hesitate to express his preference for a friend, 
"a rare and exquisite friend," over the sweetest of 
sweethearts. 

11 These two passions entered my heart in full know- 
ledge of each other, but were never to be compared ; 
the former — friendship — ever pursued its proud 
and lofty flight, and looked down disdainfully on the 
other, fluttering to and fro far beneath her. . . ." 

Montaigne enjoyed the intimate friendship of La 
Boetie for only four years, but he never forgot it. 
Eighteen years after his death, amidst all the in- 
terests of his Italian journey, he wrote in his Journal, 
or Diary: "I fell to thinking so sadly of M. de la 
Boetie, and dwelt so long on these thoughts, that 
it did me the greatest harm." And in the Es- 
says : — 

"If I compare my whole life with the four years 
during which it was granted to me to enjoy the 
sweet company and society of that friend, it is naught 
but smoke; it seems but a dark and wearisome 
night. Since the day when I lost him, I- have only 
dragged languidly along, and the very pleasures 
that offer themselves to me, instead of comforting 
me, make me feel his loss twice as keenly ; we shared 



MONTAIGNE 13 

everything together, and it seems to me that I am 
stealing his share. ..." 

But it is not only through the sentimental effu- 
sions of his inconsolable regret that Montaigne has 
given proof of the faithfulness of his attachment to 
his vanished friend. If he often complained of his 
memory, which was "marvellously apt to fail him," 
he claims — and gave ample proof — that his heart 
at least could remember. And indeed, he never 
ceased to give tokens of his devotion to his friend, 

— an active devotion ; he published La Boetie's 
works; he took his part against those who in good 
faith, after reading his pamphlet on Voluntary 
Servitude — that republican manifesto of which 
Villemain said that it was "like an ancient manu- 
script found among the ruins of Rome, under the 
shattered statue of the youngest of the Gracchi," 

— might have been tempted to look upon its author 
as a disturber of public order, as a dangerous revolu- 
tionist. No; careful of La Boetie's memory, pru- 
dent Montaigne would not allow it to be admitted 
that the brilliant writer whom he had loved so well 
and of whom he said that, had he lived, "he would 
have been the greatest man of his time," was naught 
but a rebel and a sedition-monger. He never tires 
of repeating that on the contrary "there never was 
a better citizen, one who was more anxious for the 



14 MONTAIGNE 

peace of his country, or more averse to the disturb- 
ances and novelties of his time." And as it may 
appear difficult to justify this certificate of political 
wisdom, granted to a pamphleteer who, with burn- 
ing eloquence, pleaded the cause of liberty against 
tyranny, the cause of the peoples against their 
kings, who calls those who are in office "devourers 
of the people," and religion "the body-guard of 
tyrants," Montaigne endeavours to lessen the import 
of La Boetie's words, to produce extenuating cir- 
cumstances. According to him, this pamphlet is 
a work of early youth, 1 the declamation of a sixth- 
form schoolboy, steeped in the works of the an- 
cients, hardly eighteen years of age, or even six- 
teen, as Montaigne maintains on second thoughts 
in a later edition of the Essays. It was in order not 
to compromise by fresh publicity the memory of 
his adopted brother, like "those who sought to 
disturb and change our political state," and who 
had already printed his work "with evil intent," 
that Montaigne abstained from inserting in his 

1 On Voluntary Servitude was printed in 1576, in the Memoires 
de I'Etat de France sous Charles IX, published by Simon Goulart. 
La Boetie had written it at the age of sixteen or eighteen, accord- 
ing to Montaigne, i.e. in 1546 or 1548. The latter date is the more 
probable, for the indignation which animates the young writer may 
then be explained by the bloody repression which the Constable 
Anne de Montmorency exercised at Bordeaux in 1548, in the 
king's name. 



MONTAIGNE 15 

own book the text of La Boetie's pamphlet, and set 
in its place twenty-nine more inoffensive sonnets, 
which do no less credit to La Boetie's poetical talent. 1 
A heart as sensitive to friendship as that of Mon- 
taigne cannot be taxed with coldness. The wound 
of his shattered affection never ceased to bleed. 
Besides, Montaigne by no means showed lack of 
feeling in his actions taken as a whole. He sought, 
more than he succeeded in attaining, the state of 
tranquil indifference, the ataraxy of the philosophers. 
I am well aware that his rule of life was to suffer as 
little as possible, and to keep far from him anything 
that might have afflicted him or disturbed his peace 
of mind. I am aware that he, before Montesquieu, 
said that reading and study drove away his grief: 
"The company of books takes the edge off pain," 
— and in short that, for reasons of health as much 
as of wisdom, he endeavoured to look on the best 
side of everything. 

1 On this subject one may consult an interesting communication 
made to the A cademie des Sciences morales et politiques on the 30th 
of January, 1904, by Dr. Armaingaud. According to M. Armain- 
gaud, it was Montaigne himself, whom La Boetie had appointed heir 
to his books, as his " intimate brother and close friend/' who com- 
municated to some Protestant polemical writers the text of the 
pamphlet on Voluntary Servitude, which they were the first to 
publish. M. Armaingaud even believes that Montaigne added with 
his own hand several passages to the original text. There is much 
that is obscure in Montaigne's complicated nature. 



16 MONTAIGNE 

But in spite of all his efforts, his soul was rilled 
with genuine and tender kindness. He was almost 
inclined to reproach himself with what he called 
"his extraordinary weakness for pity." — "I sym- 
pathize keenly with the afflictions of others. . . . 
The sight of the anguish of another fills me with 
distinct anguish." — He even owns to being some- 
what oversensitive, since, he says, he could not see 
a chicken slaughtered, without a feeling of pain. 
He shows love even to animals, can refuse nothing 
to his favourite dog, and although a keen huntsman, 
"he can hardly bear to hear a hare cry under the 
teeth of his dogs." The smallest trifle would put 
him about. "If my horse has been badly bridled, or 
the loose end of a stirrup-leather beats against my 
legs, I am out of sorts for the whole day." This 
sage was afflicted with nerves; the least buzzing 
of a fly was martyrdom to him. And, what is more 
interesting still, he grieved over "the indigence and 
oppression of the poor people." There is no doubt 
that the grievous spectacle of the civil wars of his 
time caused him suffering; it went to his heart to 
see his country rent asunder. If, in 1570, eighteen 
months before the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
he withdrew, at the age of thirty-seven, within his 
castle, if he shut himself up in his ivory tower, 
it was because he was sick of his century, a "spoilt 



MONTAIGNE 17 

century" in which " lying was rampant," in which 
the different factions vied with each other in deceit 
and cruelty; it was because he could not get used 
to so savage an age. He stood aloof, that he might 
no longer view at such close quarters the misery 
of his country, and it is not without reason that 
some one has said that his retreat reminds us of that 
of Alceste, fleeing from the world and from Celimene 
because he loved them too well. 

Montaigne's detractors have not spared him any 
more in his public than in his private life. They 
make him out to have been indifferent to the affairs 
of his country and careless of his duties as a citizen. 
Here, again, there is a legend to be exploded. He 
does not, indeed, seem to have been born for action. 
He was too fond of peaceful rest, and of ease, to 
have a taste for active life, with all the hardships 
which it involves. And yet he seems to have loved 
soldiering, "the noblest of professions." This taste 
manifests itself in the choice which he makes of his 
three greatest men: a poet, Homer, and two mili- 
tary leaders, Alexander the Great, whom he ranks 
with either Csesar, or Epaminondas. 1 If he did not 
seek after "high fortunes and commands," if he 
avoided "scrambling to rise above the position in 

1 Montaigne had seen active service on several occasions in the 
ranks of the army of the king against the Huguenot troops. 



18 MONTAIGNE 

which God placed him at his birth/' it was, he 
admits, because "he was overfond of his ease." 
Not, indeed, that he despised honours. He was proud 
of having been made a knight of the order of Saint- 
Michael by King Charles IX, in 1571 ; prouder still 
perhaps of having been appointed by the future 
Henry IV, in 1577, gentleman of the chamber to 
the king of Navarre. Though he does not confess 
to it in the Essays, we know from his Diary of Travel 1 
that during his stay in Rome he took every step to 
obtain the title of Roman citizen, which he bore 
with great pride. "I spared no effort to obtain 
the letters of Roman citizenship." He appreciated 
purely honorary dignities, what one might call 
platonic honours, but he preferred to waive aside with 
a disdainful hand, lest his nonchalant day-dreams 
should be disturbed, those offices which involved 
duties, hard work, and heavy responsibilities. He 
resigned in 1570, at the earliest possible moment, 
his seat in the Parliament of Bordeaux. And if he 
was elected mayor of that town in 1581, this mandate 



1 Montaigne's journey lasted nearly a year and a half, from 
the 22d of June, 1580, to the 30th of November, 1581. The Ms. of 
his Diary was found, one hundred and eighty years after his death, 
in an old strong-box, by Canon Prunis, who was on a visit at Mon- 
taigne's castle. Montaigne's heirs may well be taxed with neglect 
for forgetting among the dust of the attics so priceless a manu- 
script. 



MONTAIGNE 19 

was quite unsolicited, since the vote of his fellow- 
citizens brought him back from Italy, where he had 
been travelling for a year. 

Though Montaigne confesses that he took only a 
" languid interest" in public affairs, we must not 
conclude that he proved inferior to his task when 
called upon to act by circumstances. The mayor 
of Bordeaux was wanting neither in abnegation nor 
in vigilance. Read the letters which he addressed to 
Marshal de Matignon, his Majesty's lieutenant-gen- 
eral in Guyenne ; they show with what active solici- 
tude he watched over the interests which were en- 
trusted to him. Amidst the turmoil of civil war, 
face to face with perpetual threats of attack and 
invasion, he has an eye for everything; he inspects 
the defensive works, he remains on foot and on the 
alert at night, although "nothing is stirring," in 
order to be ready for any eventuality. "I spent 
every night under arms in the town, or else outside 
the town at the harbour." It is sufficient proof that 
he showed himself worthy of the confidence of his 
fellow-citizens, that, contrary to custom, he was re- 
elected mayor for two years in 1583. He reminds 
us, not without some show of vanity, that "this 
had only occurred twice before." His "languid 
nature" had evidently not prevented him from 
worthily fulfilling his trust. 



20 MONTAIGNE 

"I wish these people well with all my heart," 
he said, "and certainly, if occasion had arisen, I 
should have spared nothing in their service." 

But the occasion did arise, one will say — the 
plague which visited Bordeaux in 1585; and Mon- 
taigne is supposed to have then failed in his duty 
by deserting his post and faint-heartedly protect- 
ing his life from the danger of contagion. Let us 
reestablish the facts, and note, first of all, that Mon- 
taigne was absent from Bordeaux when the scourge 
fastened on the town. Must we then find fault with 
him for not returning to it? But wherein could 
his presence have benefited the unfortunate people 
of Bordeaux, during a disastrous epidemic which, 
according to contemporaries, in six months laid 
more than 14,000 victims in their graves ? 1 On 
the 30th of July, 1585, Montaigne wrote from Li- 
bourne to the magistrates of Bordeaux : — 

"I shall spare neither my life, nor aught else, 
in your service, and leave it to you to decide whether 
that which I can render you through my presence, 
at the coming elections, is worth my venturing into 
the town, in its present evil plight." 

So he placed himself at the disposal of those under 

1 This is an enormous number, and must surely be exaggerated, 
since the whole population of Bordeaux, at that time, hardly 
exceeded 40,000 inhabitants. 



MONTAIGNE 21 

his charge, who did not recall him, as they considered 
they had no need for him. Let us add that the 
plague had appeared even in Montaigne's castle, 
that he had to flee, and that for several months he 
wandered from place to place, with all his family, 
to escape the epidemic. 

" I went in painful quest of a retreat for my family, 

— a wandering family, feared alike by their friends 
and by each other, objects of horror wherever they 
sought to settle down; obliged to change their 
abode if only one of the band complained of a pain 
in his finger. . . . For six dreary months I acted 
as guide to this caravan. ..." 

There are therefore several points to urge in Mon- 
taigne's favour, to justify him for apparently shirking 
his civic duties. The truth is that he did not think 
himself obliged to run uselessly after danger, without 
its profiting any one : " I shall follow the right-minded 
party up to the stake, but stop short of it, if I can." 

— "Let Montaigne be involved in the public ruin, 
if need be; if there be no need, I shall be grateful 
to fortune if he escapes." Prudence is not cowardice, 
and to make free to blame Montaigne in this cir- 
cumstance would be to show one's self unduly exact- 
ing, unless a man is worthy of the name only on 
condition that he has a taste for useless self-sacrifice 
and unseasonable heroism. 



22 MONTAIGNE 

If Montaigne kept aloof as much as he could 
from public offices, " game he had no liking for," as 
he used to say in his hunting language, he was never 
indifferent, however, to the events of his time and 
to the fortunes of France. 1 He witnessed as a spec- 
tator, without taking any part in them, the trage- 
dies which were enacted around him, but he was 
an attentive and sad spectator, sometimes bitter 
and full of anger in his judgments. " There is so 
much corruption in the affairs of my time that I 
could not mingle in them." And he buried him- 
self anew, not without some impatience, in the 
reading of his favourite authors; he took refuge 
in the wisdom of the ancients, to turn aside and 
divert his mind from present follies, to forget, 
or try to forget, a time when " evil-doing was so 
common." — "This century is so depraved that 
whoever is guilty only of parricide and sacrilege is 
looked upon as a man righteous and honourable." 
Yet his anxious and inquisitive mind would not allow 
him to remain long absorbed in studious medita- 
tion. From within his library, he followed the course 
of events. Situated by his place of residence "at 
the very centre of disturbance of the civil wars of 

1 In 1558 Montaigne was at the siege of Thionville. In 1559 
he followed Francis II to Bar-le-Duc. In 1588 he was present 
at the States of Blois, where the Due de Guise was murdered. 



MONTAIGNE 23 

France, " — his castle was ransacked more than once 
by bands of plunderers, — "he was all the more in- 
clined to turn his thoughts to the affairs of the 
State and of the universe without, when he was 
alone," when he had leisure for reflection. He had 
tears to shed for the unfortunate Mary Stuart, "the 
fairest queen in the world, widow of the greatest 
king in Christendom. . . . She has just died by the 
hand of the executioner; an infamous and barbar- 
ous piece of cruelty!" 

What was his attitude amidst the religious or 
political factions which were rending France ? That 
of a faithful citizen, or at least of a faithful subject, 
whose loyalty remained unshaken under five suc- 
cessive kings, Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX, 
Henry III, and Henry IV. "I shall spare neither 
my care, nor, if need be, my life, to uphold the 
king's authority in everything." His attitude was 
also that of a philosopher of independent mind, who 
judges impartially, and from a high standpoint, 
both men and things, and who never abdicates the 
rights of his conscience; he remains a stranger to 
the violent passions, to the furious hatred, of the 
various parties, keeps cool, and bears himself calmly 
and judiciously through this period of universal 
folly. 

Montaigne was never a courtier, although he lived, 



24 MONTAIGNE 

now and again, " amidst the agitation of court." 
He did not adapt himself easily to the ways of 
princely companies. He loathed ceremony. He 
disliked to "hang about," to parley with some 
' i wretched unknown usher. ' ' Free and independent, 
too unbending to lend himself to the whims of 
princes, it was not in him to approve of all the acts 
of the monarch, "in troublous and distempered 
times, when the public weal is best served by treason, 
falsehood, and massacre." He would willingly 
have appropriated La Boetie's proud maxim, 
"Let us obey our parents, own allegiance to Reason, 
live in bondage to no one." He said himself: "I 
will be a slave only to Reason;" and also to Law. 
"The laws have relieved me of great distress; they 
have traced a rule of conduct for me and given me 
a master." 

And however great his loyalty, when he speaks 
in all freedom, he has harsh words for kings, who 
are after all only men such as others are, "common 
folk," and even "adventurers, less than the least 
of their subjects, from whom they differ, so to speak, 
only by their hose." He anticipated Pascal in 
saying, "It is not my reason which bends and 
yields before the great: it is my knees." 

Montaigne, of course, knew that it is the duty of 
a citizen not to remain neutral in questions of 



MONTAIGNE 25 

national importance: "It would be treason, so to 
speak, not to take sides. ... To remain uncer- 
tain, to 'sit on the fence' with regard to the diffi- 
culties of one's own country, appears to me neither 
seemly nor worthy." But he did not always con- 
form strictly to this rule of conduct. He was too 
independent to enroll himself absolutely under one 
party. He discerned with rare insight the qualities 
and faults, the virtues and vices, of the men who 
contended for power. He could appreciate the 
qualities of the Dukes of Guise, for whom he had 
conducted secret negotiations at the States of Blois, 
in 1588; he even carried to some excess his admira- 
tion for Cardinal de Lorraine, "that much begrimed 
soul," as Brantome said, whom Montaigne looked 
upon as "necessary for the public weal." But 
on the other hand, he was loud in his praise of 
Michel de l'Hopital; he visited him, in 1571, in 
his place of retreat at Vignay, and said to him, 
"I wish to do homage and show reverence to the 
peculiar qualities which are in you." He was in 
constant relation with those in authority at his 
time, and was admitted into their confidence. He 
never said to the one "what he could not have said 
to the other," for "there is nothing to prevent one 
from acting loyally between men who are enemies." 
What high lessons in moderation we receive from 



26 MONTAIGNE 

this philosopher, lost amidst a world of fanatics 
and sectarians ! He looked down upon the stream 
of intrigue and of hatred with eyes "less blinded 
with passion" than those of his contemporaries. 
"I am animated with passions neither of hatred nor 
of love toward the great ; my will is fettered neither 
through personal injuries nor through personal 
obligations." Let us profit by his wise advice, 
which applies equally to all times. Montaigne 
would not allow a man to be looked upon as a traitor 
or a turncoat, because he took the liberty of criti- 
cising certain acts of his friends or of approving 
certain ideas of his adversaries. He would have 
none of that passive obedience which enrolls all 
consciences under one flag, and which forbids any 
independence of opinion. 

"I have no words strong enough to condemn 
this vicious way of thinking! — He belongs to the 
'Ligue,' for he admires the urbanity of M. de Guise ! 
— He is amazed at the activity of the king of 
Navarre ; he is a Huguenot ! — He finds something 
to criticise in the king's manner of life ; he is preach- 
ing sedition!" 

Montaigne shared the fate suffered by impartial 
minds at all times: he incurred the disfavour of 
every party. "For the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, 
for the Guelph a Ghibelline." However careful he 



MONTAIGNE 27 

was not to compromise himself, since, to avoid 
blows, he would have hidden "even under the skin 
of a calf," he did not always succeed. If ever he 
experienced a surprise in his life, it was certainly on 
the day in 1588, when he saw himself arrested and 
incarcerated for a few hours in the Bastille by the 
partisans of the Duke of Guise. 1 

Montaigne was among those who "were amazed 
at the activity of the king of Navarre." At the 
time of his municipal administration, on the 19th 
of December, 1584, he received him, not without 
pomp, with all his court, in his castle in Perigord. 
He did not await the king's conversion to wish and 
hope for his triumph. In 1590 he wrote to him: 
"Even when I had to confess it to my priest, I was 
ever with you in your successes; now I am whole- 
heartedly on your side." 

But, whatever his respect for the personality of 
kings, Montaigne was never slow to speak freely 
to them and to give them advice. In what noble 
language, for instance, did he address Henry IV ! 
With what loftiness of political views he encouraged 
him to clemency, reminding him that with regard 
to the affections of a people, " it never rains but it 
pours," and that if only once the tide of popular 
good-will should set in his favour, its own impetus 

1 He was immediately released by order of Catharine of Medici. 



28 MONTAIGNE 

would carry it on irresistibly." With regard to 
those who had been rebellious and disaffected, he 
asked that the victor, even in the first flush of vic- 
tory, should treat them "with greater kindness than 
their protectors themselves had done." And he 
concluded this sketch of the education of a prince, 
by wishing that his Majesty " might be rather cher- 
ished than feared of his people." 

Montaigne has the poorest opinion of human 
nature. If he urges us to study and " probe" our- 
selves, it is partly that we may recognize "of what 
weak and tottering pieces our whole fabric is built 
up." "It appears to me," he dares to say, "that 
we can never be despised according to our deserts." 

"Of all the opinions which the ancients had of 
man in general, I am most inclined to adopt those 
which make us most contemptible, vile, and in- 
significant." 

He sees in man much malice and stupidity, and 
even more stupidity than malice. We seem to be 
listening to Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. And if he 
includes the whole of humanity in a universal con- 
tempt, he particularly dislikes that of his own time. 
Abhorring falsehood as he does, it disgusts him to 
see that " feint and dissembling," vices for which 
he has a "deadly hatred," have become "the most 
notable qualities of a depraved century." Rous- 



MONTAIGNE 29 

seau will oppose the virtues of man in the state of 
nature to the vices of man in a state of civilization. 
Montaigne would not gainsay this view, but he would 
rather incline to place the golden age at Athens 
or at Rome, with the ancients, whom he thinks 
superior to modern men. 

"We do not," he says, " possess their vigour of 
mind. . . . Our will is as much impaired as theirs 
ever was, but we cannot equal them, either in the 
refinements of pleasure, or in virtue." 

But Montaigne belongs to his time and shares all 
its prejudices in his opinion of women. He knows 
no better yet than to subordinate the life of woman 
to that of man; he looks upon woman as born to 
serve. Let us excuse him; two hundred years 
later, Rousseau will hold the same views. Mon- 
taigne can imagine for her no royalty but that of 
beauty; her sovereignty consists in being charming 
and graceful. " Where the ladies have a real ad- 
vantage is in their beauty." He has indeed much 
to say about them, and in the Essay entitled 
Of three Commerces or Societies, i.e. men, books, and 
women, he enters into long dissertations on feminine 
intercourse. In his travels, if he is a keen observer 
of all things, he by no means neglects to look at 
women; in the towns through which he passes, he 
is careful to note their manner of dress and their 



30 MONTAIGNE 

adornment; he distinguishes between their differ- 
ent degrees of beauty. He expresses the opinion, 
for instance, that in Italy there are not so many 
handsome women as in France, but that there are 
fewer ill-favoured ones. At Rome, he even visits 
women of doubtful morals. Like Socrates, he fre- 
quents Aspasia, but he is careful to reassure us, and 
warns us that his intercourse with courtesans is 
limited to "mere conversation," a precaution which 
is perhaps not unnecessary, coming from a man 
who confessed to having known "love in its most 
frenzied forms," and who needed to be ever on his 
guard, "being one of those in whom the flesh is 
weak." 

But however sensitive he may have been to the 
attractions of the fair sex, Montaigne nearly always 
showed himself unjust in his appreciation of their 
intellectual capacity, as also of their moral worth. 
He sets women apart in a world of their own, that 
of their "own and natural riches" ; he will not allow 
them to participate in the labours of men, and does 
not consider them fitted for mental work. Long 
before Moliere, he holds that they are learned enough 
"when they can distinguish between their husband's 
shirt and his doublet." He likes to speak ill, not 
only of their intelligence, but of their character. 
Consider the beginning of the chapter entitled "Of 



MONTAIGNE 31 

Three Good Women." Does he only know of three, 
then, in spite of his great learning? "They are not 
to be found by the dozen," he says, "particularly 
with regard to their conjugal duties. . . ." 

He would not even admit that a woman was 
capable of friendship, that feeling "in which," he 
said, "I am an expert." 

"There is no example of this sex having ever yet 
attained to it. . . . The ordinary endowments of 
women are not such as will suffice for the close com- 
munion which fosters this holy bond; their soul 
does not appear to be firm enough to stand the strain 
of so tight and so enduring a knot." 

Nor can we refrain from smiling when we see our 
philosopher call upon the authority of the ancients 
to corroborate his opinion: "By common consent 
of all ancient schools this sex has been denied any 
participation in friendship." 

Women, thus disgraced in Montaigne's mind, would 
have good cause to be indignant. But one should 
never quarrel with him for an overhasty word, for 
some rather harsh judgment which he may have 
risked. He is apt to withdraw, to contradict, what 
he has advanced. In the perpetual fluctuation of 
his thought, there is never anything definite. After 
judging women so unfavourably, he suddenly turns 
round, — a familiar trick of his, — he changes his 



32 MONTAIGNE 

mind, and in other passages of the Essays, he does 
them full justice. It is pleasant to hear him say 
that "it is vain arrogance on the part of men to 
assume over them some vague preeminence in cour- 
age and virtue." We might almost be listening 
to a latter-day " feminist" when he declares that 
"women are not at all wrong to decline to recognize 
the rules of living which obtain in this world, since 
it is men who framed them, and without consulting 
women." This scoffer goes so far as to say, "Males 
and females are cast in the same mould; there is 
no great difference between them, save such as has 
been wrought by education and custom. ..." 
And he insists : — 

"If women attain less often than men to high 
degrees of excellence, it is a wonder that this lack 
of a good education has not a worse result. Is there 
any more difference between men and them than 
there is among themselves according to the education 
which they have received, according as they have 
been brought up in town or in the country, or accord- 
ing to their nature? Why, with proper intellectual 
nourishment, should it not be possible to bridge 
the interval which exists between their understand- 
ing and that of men?" 

So, to become man's equal, woman is only await- 
ing better intellectual "nourishment," a better 



MONTAIGNE 33 

education; it is to be regretted that Montaigne, 
who understood so well the necessity of it, did not 
take the trouble to outline it. 

If Montaigne's good sense had not been enough 
to compel him to this retractation, we may believe 
that toward the end of his life the friendship of 
Mile, de Gournay would have contributed to modify 
and to soften the severity of his judgments on woman. 
The devotedness of her whom he called "his daugh- 
ter of alliance," 1 and who was supremely proud and 
happy of this title, touched him to the quick. He 
was not without some legitimate vanity, and al- 
though he says jestingly of his book that it will 
only serve "to keep some piece of butter from melt- 
ing in the market-place," he was not without some 
idea of the value of the Essays. His vanity as a 
writer was agreeably tickled by the ingenuous ad- 
miration of a young lady of twenty, who in her bom- 
bastic and somewhat peculiar style said of the 
Essays that they were "the judicial throne of reasons, 
the accession to manhood of the mind, the resur- 
rection of truth." At this outburst of feminine 
sympathy, Montaigne was delighted, though rather 
taken aback. "That she, a woman, in that century, 
and so young, should thus have understood and 

'This is Florio's translation of "sa fille d' alliance." (Trans- 
lator's note.) 



34 MONTAIGNE 

extolled him," evidently disturbed his disdainful 
estimate of feminine understanding. "The great 
vehemence with which she for long loved me and 
desired my acquaintance," — she only entered into 
relations with him in 1588, four years before his 
death, 1 — appeared to him as "an accident most 
worthy of consideration " ; note, however, that he 
says an " accident," as if he persisted in excluding 
women from participation in friendship. He at 
least admitted her to his own, and went so far as to 
say: "She is all I have left in this world. . . . She 
is one of the best parts of my own being. . . ." 

Montaigne lived in constant communion with 
books. He was a reader before aught else. His 
library, fairly well stocked with about a thousand 
volumes, was a fine one, he said, "among village 
libraries." He never travelled without books, either 
in peace or in war. He knew of no better provision 
for our journey through life. It was in his study 
that he spent "most of the days of his life, and 
most of the hours of each day." 

He was not content with reading much ; he could 
appreciate the worth of what he read. He may 
be looked upon as the creator of literary criticism, 

1 There was not only correspondence, but mutual visiting, 
between Montaigne and Mile, de Gournay. He went to see her 
at her castle in Picardy, in 1588, and Mile, de Gournay returned 
his visit at Montaigne. 



MONTAIGNE 35 

and it would be easy to compose an Art of Writing 
by bringing together various passages scattered 
through the Essays. 

The perspicacity of his literary taste is rarely at 
fault. His only blunder, almost, was his judgment 
on Rabelais, when he set down Gargantua among 
the books that are "merely intended to amuse us," 
like the Decameron of Boccaccio and the Basia of 
Johannes Secundus. His erudition was most ex- 
tensive, although he always poses as an ignoramus. 
It is true that he knew nothing of Greek, greatly 
inferior thereby to some of his contemporaries, — to 
Henri de Mesmes, who could recite Homer from 
one end to the other, and also to La Boetie, who 
had translated into French the (Economics of Xeno- 
phon. But he had a thorough knowledge of the 
Latin tongue, which he had learnt from his birth 
as another mother language: "I understand it 
better than French." In his youth he had written 
a considerable quantity of Latin verse ; in his man- 
hood even, when he was strongly moved, Latin 
words were the first to come to his lips. He knew 
Italian, as he showed by writing in that language 
part of his Diary of Travel. He was acquainted 
with Spanish, and read assiduously the books pub- 
lished in Spain, which dealt with the discovery of 
the New World. 



36 MONTAIGNE 

Some writers claim to have recognized in Mon- 
taigne the predominance of the Latin genius. This 
is not quite exact, since he disliked Cicero, and went 
to Greece to find his three greatest men: Homer, 
Alexander, and Epaminondas. And had he chosen 
a fourth, it would perhaps have been Socrates: 
"In speaking of him," says Emerson, "for once his 
cheek flushes, and his style rises to passion." 

Montaigne had a "special fondness" for poetry. 
At school, at the age of seven or eight already, he 
read Ovid with transports of delight. He read the 
whole of Virgil, then Terence, then Plautus, without 
a pause. He has been reproached wrongly with 
a preference for the literature of the Roman Deca- 
dence. It is true that he esteemed Lucan, but he 
placed in the front rank, and far above him, Virgil, 
Lucretius, Horace, and Catullus, not to mention 
Terence and Martial. He quotes Lucretius oftenest ; 
he admires Virgil most, especially in the Georgics, 
"the most finished work in poetry," and in the fifth 
book of the Mneid, "the most perfect of all." 

The historians, the philosophers, and the moralists 
were also among his favourite authors. He took little 
pleasure in reading the orators; and although he 
says of Cicero that "no man ever equalled his 
eloquence," he thought his writings "tedious"; he 
goes so far as to say that he finds in them nothing 



MONTAIGNE 37 

but "wind." He read Tacitus over and over with 
delight, and " was wont to give Csesar special praise." 
But the books which he kept ever at hand were, 
before all others, Seneca and Plutarch; Plutarch 
especially, "our Plutarch," since he had assumed 
a French garb in the translation of Amyot, to whom 
Montaigne gave the palm over all other French 
writers. 

"We ignorant men might have given ourselves 
up for lost, if the translation of Plutarch had not 
raised us from the mire." 

Among other reasons why "Plutarch is his man," 
he gives the following, to wit : that his work is com- 
posed of unconnected pieces; you can "leave him 
whenever you please; he does not compel you to 
long and assiduous labour." Is that not also one of 
the reasons to which the Essays owe their success 
and their popularity? 

One of the distinctive features of Montaigne's 
character is curiosity, a curiosity which descends to 
old wives' gossip. He has a fondness for anecdotes, 
for small details, far more, perhaps, than for general 
ideas. He collects the tittle-tattle of his immediate 
neighbourhood, of Toulouse, of Bergerac, as well as 
that of the writers of Rome and Athens. In the 
towns through which he passes he picks up the 
stories and tales which are current. 



38 MONTAIGNE 

For those who would know Montaigne intimately, 
his Diary of Travel is a document worth studying. 
In the Essays, though he hates to be artificial, he 
is nevertheless an author, composing his features 
before a mirror. In his notes of travel, hurriedly 
jotted down from day to day, he shows himself 
" naked," as he said, and often in an unexpected 
light. Travelling, indeed, with its surprises, and 
the novelty of the sights which it presents to the 
eyes, gives rise to many fresh impressions; it vivi- 
fies faculties which the routine of ordinary life had 
left inactive. In Italy, Montaigne discloses to us 
how much his soul, in spite of all his protestations, 
was open to new influences, and with what ease it 
adapted itself to foreign customs. His was an uni- 
versal soul, open to everything, ready for anything, 
more receptive even than learned; a cosmopolitan 
soul, so to speak, — cosmopolitan even as regarded 
the table, since he regretted not having brought his 
"chef" with him, in order to have him learn Italian 
cookery. 

Montaigne's journey was no doubt a satisfaction 
afforded to his taste for exploration and discovery: 
"Our life here below is a quest after Truth; the 
world is a school for inquiry." But his journey 
was undertaken especially in quest of health; it 
was a medical pilgrimage from one hot spring to 



MONTAIGNE 39 

another. Do not mention glory to him, or wealth 
or power: "Let me have health, by the grace of 
God !" His halts in Rome or Florence, to view the 
masterpieces of art, are shorter than his sojourn 
at the mineral station Delia Villa, near Lucca, to 
try to regain the physical strength which is leaving 
him. 1 It is true that with his customary irony he 
jeers at the pretended virtues of those miraculous 
waters, " which cure all diseases" ; but he uses them, 
nevertheless, and even overdoes it. Wherever there 
is a spring, without stopping to inquire about the 
nature of its waters, he hastens to it, bathes and 
drinks ; he drinks immoderately, frantically, up to 
nine glasses a day at Plombieres, seven glasses at 
Baden or at Lucca. . . . 

"How little industrious I am!" Montaigne used 
to say. Must we then tax him with laziness ? Yes, 
if laziness consists in a dislike for regular work, in 
the avoidance of all painful effort. — Of the game 
of chess he used to say, "I hate it, because it re- 
quires too much effort for a game." — No, if it is 
true that the ever active, ever alert and inquisitive 
mind of a man who loved travelling because he found 



1 Montaigne had also frequented the mineral springs of France, 
Bagneres de Bigorre, Eaux-Chaudes, Dax, etc. Cf. the study by 
Dr. Constantin James: Montaigne, ses voyages aux eaux minerales, 
Paris, 1859. 



40 MONTAIGNE 

in it a continual "exercitation," cannot be charged 
with laziness. 

Would it be any fairer to reproach him with 
having been nothing but an egotist? Here again 
we might plead either for or against, on the author- 
ity of Montaigne's own declarations. His advocate 
might quote for the defence the passages in the 
Essays, where he says that he is sociable to excess 
that can enjoy no pleasure unless he shares it with 
others. "My essential form," he said, "is a ten- 
dency to communication." He loved conversation 
as an exercise of the soul, apart from any other 
gain to be derived from it; and in conversation, he 
said, there should be naught but kindness, straight- 
forwardness, cheerfulness, and friendship. 

But, on the other hand, how many confessions of 
his show him solely concerned with his personal 
happiness, and convinced that the first duty of man 
is to be happy ! 

"A man should take to wife none but himself. . . . 
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to 
belong to one's self. . . . We should reserve a back- 
shop for ourselves, entirely our own, entirely free, 
where we may establish our true liberty, where we 
may discourse and laugh, as if we had neither wife, 
nor children, nor possessions." 

The state that Pascal realized in his life through 



MONTAIGNE 41 

piety, mysticism, and love of God, — a state of re- 
nunciation of human affections and of withdrawal 
within himself, — Montaigne attained to that state 
by another road, through love of himself. "The 
ego is hateful," said Pascal; "the ego is our all," 
Montaigne would almost say. Starting from those 
contradictory principles, the two moralists arrive 
at the same practical conclusion : a sort of cenobitism 
of a religious type with the one, of a lay type with 
the other. 

Montaigne's egotism is at bottom only a need of 
independence, carried to its extreme limit. He 
was determined to belong to himself. He hated 
being under any obligation, or being bound in any 
way. He hated above all servitude or subjection : — 

"Princes do me enough good when they do me 
no harm; that is all I require of them." 

He is the enemy of any assiduity, of any constraint : 
"I have a deadly hatred of being either bound or 
subject to any other than myself." 

Domestic affairs, although less important than 
public business, are not less irksome to him ; he calls 
them "servile duties." He wishes his happiness 
to depend on himself alone. He is so anxious to 
rid himself of all subjection, of all obligations, that 
sometimes he considered himself the gainer by the 
ingratitude of those to whom he had done a service, 



42 MONTAIGNE 

because it dispensed him from fresh efforts to renew 
his good offices. While he admits that we should 
act while we are young, and give to the world "our 
more active and flourishing years," he thinks we 
should detach ourselves very soon, and early "take 
leave of the company." 

"We have lived enough for others; let us live for 
ourselves at least during this remainder of life ; and 
let us live to seek our ease." 

Montaigne has another fault : he is not without 
vanity. He is proud of his armorial bearings, and 
swells with importance when he says, " My coat is 
azure treflee or," etc. 

He puts down in his diary, with great satisfaction, 
the civilities shown to him, as to a stranger of dis- 
tinction, by the magistrates and notable men of the 
towns which he visits. In the inns where he takes 
his quarters, his escutcheon with his coat-of-arms 
must be affixed to the outer walls. He speaks with 
vanity of his ancestors, of his castle: "It is my 
birthplace and that of most of my ancestors," and 
he introduces them to us as gentlemen of an old 
stock, although they were nothing but rich fish- 
mongers, according to Scaliger. 1 

The reader must not think, however, that it was 

1 Scaliger had been a pupil at the " College de Guyenne " a few 
years after Montaigne. 



MONTAIGNE 43 

through vanity that he spoke so much of himself. 
It is without any underlying pride, and at the risk 
of compromising himself in the opinion of his readers, 
that he complacently gives us such minute informa- 
tion on his most intimate habits. He disobeys the 
maxim of the ancients, "Hide thy life." He gives 
us his physical portrait, speaks of his heavy mus- 
tache, of his medium stature and thickset body, 
adding that a handsome stature is the only beauty 
of men, and that he could lay no claim to it. But 
it is his moral self that he outlines. "What a fool- 
ish design Montaigne formed," says Pascal, "to go 
and picture himself!" We might retort, with Vol- 
taire, that it was on the contrary "a charming 
design," and especially with Bernardin de Saint- 
Pierre, "When J.- J. Rousseau and Montaigne talk 
about themselves, I think they are talking about 
me." If Montaigne has met with so much favour, it 
is because almost all men recognize themselves in 
him, with their weaknesses and faults. He confessed 
to his with such easy frankness, that it seems to 
us that his example is an excuse for our own faults. 
In any case we cannot reproach him with showing 
himself in too favourable a light, with singing his 
own praises, since he is apt rather to jeer at himself : 
"I am nothing but a goose." He tells us, to our 
surprise, that he is completely wanting in memory; 



44 MONTAIGNE 

his other faculties, he says, are of the most common- 
place type. In his assumption of false modesty, 
he goes so far as to say, "Everything is coarse in 
me; there is a lack of grace and beauty." 

If we are to believe him, he was but a dull boy at 
school, "both heavy and leaden, longer to learn a 
lesson, and less interested, not only than all his 
brothers, but even than all the children of his prov- 
ince"; and he means these words to apply both to 
the exercises of the body and to those of the mind. 

Montaigne's moderation has often been praised, 
and it is certain that he was, before aught else, a 
believer in the golden mean. He is in this respect 
a typical example of the French spirit, of the old 
French spirit at least, of that exquisite sense of 
measure that we are gradually losing. He is mod- 
erate even in wisdom : — 

"In my old age, I guard against temperance, as 
I did formerly against pleasure. Wisdom may 
be carried to excess, and requires moderation no 
less than folly. There may be excess in virtue, and 
it is no longer virtue, if any excess be in it." 

Even when he feels most keenly, he keeps himself 
well in hand; he does not give himself entirely 
away; "he spares his will." He was voluptuous, 
it must be admitted, since he said, "If I find 
the smallest opportunity for pleasure, I grab at 



MONTAIGNE 45 

it"; — and again, "I who have no other aim 
but to live and to enjoy life"; — and yet he 
strove to avoid temptation; he was on his guard 
against his passions. In his youth, he would fight 
against the progress of any love entanglement, 
when "he felt it taking too great a hold on him." 
He did not allow his feeling to burst into such a 
flame as would have held him "at its mercy." He 
curbed his will, as soon as it fastened too lustfully 
on any object. Not that he entered upon a direct 
struggle, for effort was painful to him, but he em- 
ployed stratagem and cunning to get the better 
of his new-born passion, and created diversions in 
order to weaken the desire which threatened to 
tyrannize over him. 

This wise spirit of moderation, which character- 
izes Montaigne, does not, however, go so far as to 
forbid him fits of anger and indignation, or strong 
hatred. Whatever wisdom study and meditation 
have instilled into him, his Gascon nature some- 
times regains the upper hand with all its fierceness. 
He certainly shows little moderation when, before 
Moliere, and with even more harshness, he showers 
sarcasm and invective upon medicine and doctors, 
"with their magistral fopperies and prosopopeyal 
gravity." — "The sun shines upon their successes 
and the earth hides their blunders. . . . They 



46 MONTAIGNE 

killed off a friend of mine who was worth more than 
the whole lot of them." — He shows no moderation 
when, with scathing irony, he attacks pedantry and 
false science; when he calls philosophy "a clatter 
of brains." He shows least moderation of all when, 
allowing himself to be carried away, full sail, with a 
relentless vehemence for which Pascal admired him, 
he pitilessly takes human reason to task for its con- 
tradictions, uses its own weapons to crumple it up, 
revolts against its pretensions to attain to certainty, 
and places man "by special favour, on a level with 
beasts." 

If, in his indictment of reason, Montaigne bases 
himself on the contradictions of human opinions: 
" There never were in this world two opinions alike ; " 
— he might equally well have instanced, in support 
of his argument, the indecisions of his own mind 
and of his ever vacillating thought : — 

"Distinguo: on this word I base the whole of my 
logic. . . . There are just as great disparities within 
ourselves as between ourselves and others. . . . 
Within myself will be found every contradiction: 
I am bashful and insolent, chaste and licentious, 
talkative and silent, hard-working and a dilettante 
[he does not say "lazy"], ingenious and dull, morose 
and good-natured, given to lying [when he referred, 
for instance, to the noble origin of his family] and 



MONTAIGNE 47 

truthful, learned and ignorant, open-handed, stingy 
and prodigal." 

And a few more characteristics might be added: 
sceptical and credulous, indifferent and passionate, 
stay-at-home and fond of travelling. . . . There 
are all sorts of men in Montaigne. He experienced 
every impulse of human nature. And what he said 
of other men is at least true of himself, "Each man 
bears within himself every attribute of humanity." 

With Montaigne we must always be on our guard, 
and distrust even his most categoric affirmations. 
You have recorded one of his opinions, for which 
he has stated the strongest grounds. That, then, 
is his final verdict, you say, and you are about to 
congratulate him or to show that he is wrong. Do 
not be over-hasty, for if you turn the page, you will 
perhaps find a different, or even a contrary, con- 
clusion on the same subject, and expressed with the 
same apparent conviction; you may even think it 
impossible that such contradictory ideas should have 
"come from the same shop." Nothing is more dis- 
concerting than this uncertain course of an ever 
elusive thought, at the mercy of every wind, and 
which never finds its moorings. 

Let us consider, however, that the fluctuating 
indecision of Montaigne's judgments springs from 
some of the qualities of his mind: first, from the 



48 MONTAIGNE 

impetuosity of his imagination: "I love to see 
poetry skip and frolic on its way. . . . My own 
style and mind ramble about in a like manner;" 
and, secondly and especially, from his penetrating 
acuteness, his anxious curiosity, which makes him 
turn the same subject over and over in his mind, 
in order to see further into it. Let superficial minds 
pride themselves on never varying ! When once 
they have got hold of a little bit of the truth, they 
stick to it, and will no longer depart from the shal- 
low opinion they have formed after a rapid glance at 
the object they are studying. Montaigne, who goes 
below the surface, and right round an idea, who looks 
at every side of a fact and often returns to the same 
question, sees it in turn from every point of view. 
Montaigne's contradictions are in the main only the 
consequence of the very complexity of the questions 
he sets himself, the reflection of a world which is 
naught but " variety and dissimilarity." — "I con- 
tradict myself, but I do not contradict truth." 

It is also possible that Montaigne's contradictions 
are due to the inconsistency of a character made up 
entirely of contrasts. He blamed those who are 
ever the slaves of the same inclination, and, in his 
expressive language, said that "he would rather 
approve of a soul built up of several platforms, such 
as might be raised to any height and taken to pieces 



MONTAIGNE 49 

again." The suppleness of his mind verged on in- 
coherence. In one place, he will say of Socrates 
that he is "the man most worthy to be known and 
given as an example to the world"; in another he 
will extol Alcibiades, and "his life, the richest that 
one could live." In the same chapter, he will talk, 
like a saint, "of divine Providence, which allows its 
Church to be tossed amid so many storms, in order 
to awaken pious souls"; and a few lines further on 
he will tell us at great length his own adventures 
with the ladies. 

The inconsistency of Montaigne's character be- 
trays also a certain levity. His imagination carried 
him away. ' ' Most of us, in the workings of our mind, 
require lead rather than wings." — "A very little," 
he would say, "diverts us and leads us astray, be- 
cause we are held down by very little." He was 
liable to fly away at any moment because he never 
clung strongly to anything. We are grieved to find 
that even when sunk in grief over the loss of La 
Boetie, he immediately sought a diversion : — 

"I once suffered a great grief; to divert my 
thoughts, I played at being in love. And love 
consoled me of the pain that friendship had caused 
me." 

The Essays contain lessons for every age, as we 
have just seen, some of them not altogether edify- 



50 MONTAIGNE 

ing. They contain excellent ones for old age. Now 
it should be noticed that Montaigne thought himself 
on the downward slope of old age when he was only- 
forty years old. Thenceforward he was only "half 
a being, " as he said. In 1582, at the age of fifty, 
while writing the third book of the Essays, he 
said, "I am shrivelling up and growing rancid." 
But what a cheerful and smiling old man he is ! 
How he strives to maintain, amidst the infirmities 
of age and the harbingers of death, his good-humour 
and his gayety! God keep him from resembling 
those whose soul, as they grow old, " grows sour and 
musty!" As his memories roam through his long 
years of past happiness, he does not consume him- 
self in vain regret: "I neither complain of the past, 
nor fear the future." He considers himself happy 
to have journeyed so far through life: "I have seen 
the young shoot and the flowers, and the fruit, and 
I now see the withering of the stock." No doubt 
the poor man, who, as he says, is "on the high road 
to ruin," does show some little regret for the days 
of his youth, so green and full of strength. Read, 
for instance, the chapter On Some Verses of Virgil, 
which would be better entitled : The Art of Love, 
or Confessions of a Don Juan. 1 If Montaigne finds 

1 Scaliger said that this chapter should have for a title Coq-a 
I'dne, or Cock and Bull Stories. 



MONTAIGNE 51 

it somewhat difficult to take leave of the pleasures 
of youth, he starts in quest of others, and grows 
fond of good cheer: "I am learning to appreciate 
good wine and good sauces." Better still, he en- 
deavours to remain youthful in mind ; for it is the 
privilege of the mind to " regain possession of itself" 
and to rise above the attacks of age : "Let my mind 
remain green, and bloom, if it can, like mistletoe, 
on a dead tree. ..." It is true that elsewhere 
he will confess sadly that old age "puts more wrin- 
kles on our minds than on our faces." 

He had no fear of death, of which he said, playing 
on the words, that it is "not the end, but the termi- 
nation of life"; l and elsewhere that it is "the last 
act of the play." Even "amidst the dances and 
games" of his youth, he already thought of death. 
One of his admirers, Justus Lipsius, mistook not 
when he wrote to Mile, de Gournay, — begging her 
to look upon him thenceforth "as her brother," — 
that their adoptive father "had no doubt greeted 
death with that cheerfulness which was natural 
to him." Indeed, it is very surprising that the idea 
of death should present itself so often to Montaigne's 
mind, like a haunting obsession. He constantly 
returns to it, not to tremble, but to "grow familiar 
with it." — "Let us have nothing so often in our 

1 Non le but, mais le bout de la vie. 



52 MONTAIGNE 

minds as death." He wishes, he says, "to be recon- 
ciled to death, to make friends with it." His suffer- 
ings help him to prepare for it, to go through what 
we might call the education of death. He notes 
down with the greatest minuteness what his im- 
pressions had been, one day that he had fainted after 
a fall from his horse; and he concludes from this 
semi-experience that the passage from life to death 
is perhaps not so painful as people imagine. 

" Perhaps death is not worth all the trouble I take, 
all the preparations I make, all the assistance I call 
up and collect in order to bear that ordeal. I can 
depart, when it pleases God, without regretting 
anything in this world." 

What he hopes for is a sudden death: " Death 
is all the better for being swift." It is then, he says 
almost light-heartedly, only a difficult quarter of 
an hour to go through. He would not mind dying 
on horseback. If he had lived in our times, death 
in a motor-car would have been quite to his taste. 
Being an epicure, and fond of his ease even in death, 
he would fain die gently, without sadness, far from 
the honest tears of relatives, and of the feigned 
demonstrations of grief of false friends. 

How can we wonder that Pascal, a Christian, who 
never contemplates death and its mystery without 
quaking, is indignant with a philosopher who awaits 



MONTAIGNE 53 

it almost with indifference, and who would "die 
basely, unresistingly, like a pagan " ? Montaigne's 
feelings with regard to death are "horrible," says 
Pascal. 1 No, they are those of a man nobly resigned 
to the common law, — those of a man who hopes to 
die as he lived, like a sage, master of himself; who 
sees his last moments drawing nigh, not only undis- 
turbed, but without "care," without anxiety, and 
who continues "the course of his life even unto 
death." 

Where Pascal is right, is when he observes that 
amid Montaigne's reflections on death, there is 
hardly a thought given to the hereafter. With 
regard to immortality, no doubt, as on all other 
religious questions, the author of the Essays pro- 
fesses the Roman Catholic faith. But at heart, 
regarding that future life which he hardly ever 
mentions, had he any definite assurance, any settled 
opinion? The answer is doubtful. He quotes, 
without comment, La Boetie's dying words: "I 
am going, I am certain of it, to find God and the 
abode of the blessed. ..." And likewise, in his 
eulogy of Julian the Apostate, "that man so great 
and so rare" — the censors of the Roman Inquisi- 
tion took him to task for these words of praise, and 

1 Pascal was almost as angry with him for having expressed 
doubts regarding the certainty of geometry. 



54 MONTAIGNE 

invited him to "reclothe" this passage, — he notes, 
without adding a word, the fact that Julian "had 
a strong faith in the eternity of souls." And again, 
he will say of those who sacrifice the care of our 
present existence to the thought of their future 
destiny: "That opinion is absurd, which holds our 
present life in contempt. ..." What conclusion 
are we to come to, but that the immortality of the 
soul was for Montaigne a problem to which he affixed 
a note of interrogation, and to which he applied his 
famous "What do I know ?" ; that it was at the most 
vague and uncertain hope? 

"O what a bold faculty is hope, which, in mortal 
man, and in a moment, does not shrink from usurp- 
ing the Infinite, Immensity, nay, Eternity itself ! . . ." 

Montaigne's religion has been the subject of much 
discussion. Large volumes, — such as that of Abbe 
de la Bouderie, — have been written on his Chris- 
tian faith. Others, readers of Chateaubriand, have 
said that the Essays might be called, "The Genius 
of Paganism." Whom are we to listen to? What 
is beyond doubt is that Montaigne bears himself 
outwardly as a perfectly orthodox Roman Catholic. 
He partakes of the Sacraments; he is devout, he 
makes the sign of the Cross "whenever there is 
occasion"; for instance, "when he yawns." At 
Eastertide he receives the sacrament at Loreto, in 



MONTAIGNE 55 

Italy ; * but vainglorious as ever, he would have us 
know that he receives it in a private chapel, " which 
every one may not do." He repeats the Lord's 
Prayer: a prayer " dictated by the very mouth of 
God," and indeed the only one which he used. He 
has a priest called to his death-bed. And again 
he declares that he submits humbly to the Catholic 
church, "in which he is dying and into which he 
was born." He bows his head before the divine 
will. 

"It is enough that a Christian should believe that 
all things come from God, and receive them in the 
full acknowledgment of His divine and inscrutable 
wisdom." 

It was Man in the state of nature that the Jansen- 
ists anathematized in Montaigne. And yet it often 
happened that he called upon divine grace, and upon 
the assistance of God, to sustain him in his human 
weakness. Pascal would have subscribed without 
demur to this passage of the Essays : — 

"Oh! what a vile and abject thing is man, if 
he do not rise above humanity ! And he will thus 
rise, if God, by special favour, will lend him his aid." 

But neither those orthodox declarations, nor 

1 At Lore to, Montaigne had the following "ex-voto," or votive 
tablet, engraved : Michael Montanus, Gallus Vasco, eques regii 
ordinis ; Francisco, Cassaniana uxor, Leonora Montana filia unica. 



56 MONTAIGNE 

those religious practices, are a guarantee that Faith 
was in him. Montaigne, Pascal said, "acts as a 
pagan"; he also thought as a pagan. His Chris- 
tianity was all on the surface ; an outward submis- 
sion to the use and wont of the country of his birth. 
I am a Christian, he said, as I belong to Perigord. 
He is a Roman Catholic, rather than a Christian; 
a philosopher rather than a Roman Catholic. It 
should be noted that though he quotes much, he 
rarely quotes the Gospel, and never speaks of Christ. 
A man can be no great believer in revelation when 
he writes : — 

"Whatever we learn, it is a mortal hand which 
presents it to us, a mortal hand which accepts it." 

He is fond of relating miraculous occurrences, but he 
observes, not without irony, that miracles are invari- 
ably withheld from his sight; and he expressly affirms 
that the order and course of Nature can be disturbed 
by no intervention. In his relations with the church, 
he seems to adopt more or less the same attitude as 
he does toward medicine. He heaps upon doctors 
his most stinging epigrams, and yet, having reached 
the end of his diatribe, he bows low to them : "How- 
ever, I hold doctors in honour. . . . When I am sick, 
I call them to me ; I pay them, like other people. ..." 
Yes; but he adds that "his judgment must needs 
be marvellously out of joint, if ever he should be- 



MONTAIGNE 57 

lieve in their power and in the efficacy of their 
drugs." 

It is difficult to gather exactly what Montaigne 
thought of the Reformation. In the perpetual 
oscillation of his judgment, at one time he declares 
that posterity will celebrate it for having fought 
against error and vice, for having filled the world 
with piety, humility, obedience, and all manner of 
virtues ; and anon he scoffs at the efforts which the 
Protestants are making to spread the knowledge 
of the Bible by means of translations: "A strange 
people, who think they have brought the Word of 
God within the understanding of the masses, because 
they have put it into popular language!" It re- 
mains certain that his attitude toward the religious 
quarrels of his time was the same as in political 
questions: he kept aloof and remained neutral; 
he did not follow the example of those among his 
own brothers who had been converted to Protes- 
tantism. 1 

"Let those who in these latter days have so ear- 
nestly laboured to frame and establish unto us an 
exercise of religion and service of God, so contem- 
plative and immaterial, wonder nothing at all if 

1 Montaigne was the third child of a large family, — seven or 
eight boys or girls. His two elder brothers were already dead 
when he was born. 



58 MONTAIGNE 

some be found who think it would have escaped 
and mouldered away between their fingers. " 

A man "of good faith/' but of little faith, Mon- 
taigne, in his inmost soul, remained outside any 
religious confession. The wisdom to which he as- 
pires is a human wisdom, which should be "neither 
produced nor disquieted by religion." He wishes 
to live the human life, in conformity with his natural 
condition. He is the true forerunner of modern 
freethinkers. He has the intuition of the advent 
of a lay and rational system of ethics, "sprung from 
nature," and which shall feel "strong enough to 
stand unaided, born and rooted within ourselves, 
of the seed of universal reason, which is to be found 
within every unperverted man." He eliminates 
the supernatural, and claims to find within himself 
"as much doctrine as he needs." Sainte-Beuve 
was not wrong when he said that a chapter might 
be written on the dogmatism of Montaigne. But 
this dogmatism does not exceed the limits of practical 
reason. It is a doctrine of life, which he bases either 
on the precepts and examples of ancient wisdom, 
or on conscience, of which he said that "its grip is 
tighter and more severe than that of a tribunal 
of judges." But in the domain of pure reason, 
Montaigne is indifferent and sceptical. He sings 
the same song as Pascal on the impotence of human 



MONTAIGNE 59 

reason, but he sings it to another tune, and the 
finale is not the same. In vain are we reminded that 
Montaigne said grace before meat and heard mass 
in his bedroom. It is none the less true that in the 
apartment above, in the sanctuary of his library, 
he had caused to be engraved on the rafters of the 
ceiling, as if to have them constantly hovering over 
him, fifty-six maxims, which are as a summary of 
his philosophy and the essence of scepticism: " Van- 
ity, uncertainty, error. ... — Man is but a vessel 
of clay, a dim shadow, mud and ashes. — I lay down 
no law; I do not understand; I suspend judgment, 
etc. . . ." The conclusion of his intellectual quest 
is the "I know not" of Socrates, with the addition 
of a note of interrogation, "What do I know?" 



n 

Montaigne's Pedagogy 

Montaigne is no pedagogue of the people ; alone, 
in the sixteenth century, the men of the Reforma- 
tion took any thought of popular education, j The 
plan that he puts before us, in the celebrated chapter 
Of the Institution and Education of Children, was 
conceived only for a son of noble family, happily 
situated and of exalted birth, his little neighbour 
at the castle of Gurson. 1 His theme was the edu- 
cation, under the guidance of a carefully chosen 
" governor" or tutor, of a young nobleman intended 
by his condition for a life of ease, and perhaps of 
idleness. But as of this little nobleman Montaigne 
wants to make a man, his views often extend beyond 
the limited horizon of a castle-education, and many 
of his maxims are applicable to children of all con- 
ditions and of all times. Moreover, Montaigne's 

1 This Essay, Chapter XXIV of Book I, is dedicated to Diane 
de Foix, Countess de Gurson, with reference to her child, who, 
for that matter, was not yet born. Montaigne, with the high 
spirits of a Southerner, prophesies that this child about to be 
born must needs be a boy: "for, madam, you are too generous 
to begin with other than a man-child. . . ." 

60 



MONTAIGNE 61 

impetuous imagination often carried him far beyond 
the limits within which he seemed to have intended 
to keep his reflections ; so that while he deals with 
a private and individual education, it often happens 
that he touches on pedagogical questions of general 
import. - Lastly, it is not only in the one chapter 
dedicated to Countess de Gurson that Montaigne 
discusses education; his whole work is strewn with 
digressions in which he gives us his own views, or 
else criticises the teaching and disciplinary methods 
then in use. "I am fond of reverting to this ques- 
tion of the 'ineptness' of our education." 

Montaigne, who is averse to any set opinions, 
harbours no superstitious belief in the virtues of edu- 
cation. He does not look upon it as an infallible 
and all-powerful means of success, nor does he believe 
that the future of the individual depends upon it 
alone. To the best professional pedagogues he op- 
poses " those good schoolmasters which are Nature, 
Youth, and Health." He recognizes the strength of 
physical heredity, and that also of moral predestina- 
tion. 

"We bear within ourselves the impulses, not only 
of the corporal being, but also of the thoughts and 
inclinations of our parents. . . . Natural inclina- 
tions may be helped and strengthened by educa- 
tion, but they can hardly be changed or overcome. 



62 MONTAIGNE 

I have seen in my time a thousand natures fly to 
virtue or to vice, in opposition to the discipline they 
were subjected to. There is no one who, if he 
hearkens unto himself, will not discover within him 
a form which is his own, a master-form, which fights 
against education. ..." 

At every moment the expressions "a well-begotten 
soul," "an ill-begotten mind," recur under his pen; 
and he quotes himself in proof of the action of natural 
and hereditary influences : — 

"What good there is in me I owe to the accident 
of my birth ; I hold it neither from laws, nor precepts, 
nor any other apprenticeship." 

If he admits that there are limits to the effects of 
education, he is far, however, from undervaluing 
its importance. "Who is there but sees that in a 
state everything depends on this education and 
nurturing ? " And consequently he would view with 
favour the intervention of the State, and even its 
sovereign authority, in the matter of education. He 
laments that the Spartans and the Cretans were the 
only nations who "committed the care of youth to 
the law" ; and quite forgetting that it is for a mother 
of good birth that he is drawing up a plan of domestic 
education, he declares that it is great folly to leave 
education under the authority of the parents, "how- 
ever foolish and wicked they may be." 



MONTAIGNE 63 

Montaigne is ever inspired by antiquity, by Plato, 
Socrates, by Plutarch especially. He could not, 
like Rabelais, give himself the pleasure of reading 
in the original text "the Opera moralia of Plutarch 
and the fine Dialogues of Plato." And yet it is 
by calling to his aid his memories of the Classics, 
the " pedagogisms " of Plato and the Socratic method, 
that, after Rabelais, and with as much heat as the 
latter, he makes a violent onslaught on the " inept" 
education of his time. Whoever is acquainted with 
his invectives against pedantry, vain erudition, 
false learning, and also against the barbarous dis- 
cipline of the Middle Ages, will no longer be tempted 
to take him for a sceptic, a cold and indifferent wit- 
ness of the evil the existence of which he recognizes 
and condemns. On this subject, he is no longer 
content to smile and to jest; he waxes indignant, 
levels accusations, is carried away by his anger. 
He finds no words stinging enough to scourge ped- 
ants and their "asinine" and overweening presump- 
tion, to break away from empty rhetoric, from syllo- 
gistic dialectics : — 

"I would rather be a good cook than a good rhet- 
orician. ... I would rather have my son, if I 
had one, learn to talk in taverns than in schools of 
rhetoric. . . . Whoever acquired reason through 
logic ? Where are its fine promises ? Does one hear 



64 MONTAIGNE 

more rambling nonsense between gossiping fish- 
wives than in the public disputations of dialecticians ? 
It is baroco and baralipton which have so besotted 
and befogged their devotees." 

Montaigne's pedagogy is then before aught else 
a protest and a reaction against the faults of medi- 
aeval schools, and also against the abuses which the 
literary fanaticism of the Renaissance had brought 
into fashion. - His pedagogical doctrine — for he 
had one — is already apparent in his criticisms. 
It is a counterthrust of the new spirit, of the spirit 
of light and liberty, against the long enslaving of 
the obscure ages which had proscribed gentleness 
in discipline and independence in teaching. It is 
also, before Rousseau, a return to Nature, that is to 
say, in Montaigne's words, to what is "general, 
common, and universal," to what is human, in 
short. Montaigne disowns anything "which is 
supported only by the hoary beard and the wrinkles 
of custom"; he refers everything "to truth and 
reason." He is bent on following "the fine open 
road traced for us by v Nature," from which the 
importunate subtlety of a false philosophy turns 
us aside by "enslaving our natural freedom." 

"We cannot go wrong in following Nature. The 
sovereign precept is to conform to it. . . . It is 
unreasonable that the art of man should take prece- 



MONTAIGNE 65 

dence of our great and powerful mother Nature. . . . 
Wherever Nature shines in its purity, it is marvellous 
how it puts to shame our vain and frivolous enter- 
prises." 

Montaigne is undoubtedly the first who brought 
into prominence this truth, which became after 
him one of the commonplaces of classical pedagogy, 
that before that specialized education which turns 
out a professional man, a scientist, or a scholar, 
there is, there ought to be, a general education which 
makes the man. He explains this humorously under 
the form of an anecdote : — 

" Being once on my journey toward Orleans, it 
was my chance to meet upon that plain that lyeth 
on this side Clery, with two masters of arts travelling 
toward Bordeaux, about fifty paces one from an- 
other; far off behind them I descried a troop of 
horsemen, their master riding foremost, who was the 
Earl of Rochefoucault. One of my servants in- 
quiring of the first of those masters of arts, what 
gentleman he was that followed him ; supposing my 
servant had meant his fellow-scholar, for he had not 
yet seen the Earl's train, answered pleasantly, 'He 
is no gentleman, but a grammarian, and I am a 
logician/ Now, we that contrariwise seek not to 
frame a grammarian, nor a logician, but a complete 
gentleman, let us give them leave to misspend their 



66 MONTAIGNE 

time; we have elsewhere, and somewhat else of 
more import to do." 

The essential element of this general education 
consists in the education of judgment, and that is 
the culminating point of Montaigne's pedagogy. _ 

If the scholar has learned to judge, the supreme 
end of education will have been reached. What, 
then, is meant by judging? 

To judge is first of all to think for one's self, to 
hold opinions which are our own ; it is to inquire 
after truth through an effort of personal reflection. 

To judge is to think rightly, to see clearly in all 
questions which may present themselves, thanks to 
the clear understanding that pertains to an unwarped 
mind. ; 

To judge well, lastly, is to be able and ready to' 
act well. For correct judgment keeps one free from 
the errors and illusions which are the source of evil 
actions. Soundness of thought calms and appeases 
passions. To think for one's self and to think rightly 
is already to have acquired moral strength. 

On the first of these points, that is, independence 
of thought, Montaigne explains his views as forcibl; 
as the author of the Discourse on Method will do 
century later : — 

"Learn to think freely, and not to follow lamel 
on the track of another; make bold to shake ridici 



MONTAIGNE 67 

lous foundations upon which false opinions are built. 
. . . Truth and reason are common to all." 

Montaigne himself gives the example of this liberty 
of thought ; he does not allow himself to be ensnared 
and blinded by the authority of present custom, 
nor by fashion, which " topsyturvies" the under- 
standing of his contemporaries. He inveighs with 
inexhaustible vigour against purely verbal education, 
that which makes no appeal to personal judgment, 
and which is content to stamp upon the memory 
knowledge that the mind has neither tested nor 
examined, and that it does not assimilate. 

"We are like unto him who, being in need of fire, 
should go and beg some at his neighbour's, and find- 
ing there fire in plenty, should stop there to warm 
himself, without remembering to bring any home. — 
Even as the birds which feed their young carry the 
grain in their beaks without tasting it, thus do our 
pedants purloin science from books, which they in no 
way digest, but merely keep on their lips, ever ready 
to part with it again and scatter it to the winds." 

Learning is of use only to him who has been able 

to assimilate it, to espouse it, and to make really 

his own the opinions which one borrows from others. 

The work of the mind should resemble that of bees, 

vho fly hither and thither sucking the flowers, but 

nth their plunder they make honey, after which it 



68 MONTAIGNE 

is no longer either thyme or marjoram. . . . What 
is important is not the extent of one's knowledge, 
but one's power of reflection; it is the strength of 
a well-developed reason, which weighs and scruti- 
nizes the motives of its beliefs and shapes its opinions 
freely: "The soul is not a vessel that requires filling; 
it is a hearth to be warmed." — "I would rather 
shape my soul than furnish it." 

Nor indeed would it avail that our judgment should 
be our own, if it should prove to be false. Rectitude 
of mind is one of the foremost intellectual virtues. 
Better a well-fashioned head than a well-filled one. 
If, says Montaigne, I like to subject to "inquisition," 
that is to say, to examination, "the continual variety 
of human affairs, it is that our judgment may become 
the more enlightened and the stronger." He does, 
personally, everything he can to moderate the rash 
impetuosity of his own judgment. He recommends 
prudence, and is mindful of it himself. He reminds 
us that "each thing has a hundred faces"; and that 
it beseems us, therefore, to analyze, to distinguish, 
and also to pause, in any delicate subject, when we 
feel that we cannot proceed, "sounding the ford," 
as he says, ' ' and if we find it too deep for our stature, 
keeping on the bank " ; that is to say, abstaining 
from formulating an opinion. 

Judgment, then, is the critical spirit which ob- 



MONTAIGNE 69 

serves, reasons, and concludes ; it is the understand- 
ing which disentangles truth from error. But it is 
also the faculty which distinguishes good from evil, 
and which regulates our manner of living. Mon- 
taigne does not keep judgment apart from moral 
conscience. It is that we may become better men 
that he would have us better able to judge. He con- 
stantly associates those two points of view. He 
will say: "This will make men better advised and 
more virtuous." His chief reproach against the 
education of his day is that it leaves both our under- 
standing and our conscience empty of content. 
The Middle Ages subordinated all teaching to theol- 
ogy; Montaigne subordinates it to ethics. True 
education tends toward action. "My science is 
to learn how to live." He never ceases to expa- 
tiate on this subject, and he repeats under every 
form that the advantage we derive from study is 
that we become better and wiser. If he is so violent 
in his attacks on book-learning, it is because the 
latter commits the mistake of neglecting practical 
and moral education. 

"Behold this man, snuffling, blear-eyed, and 
unwashed, rising after midnight from his study. 
Think you that he is seeking, among his books, how 
he may become better, more contented, and wiser? 
Alas, no ! . . ." 



70 MONTAIGNE 

Could Montaigne point to his own example to 
extol the theory that looks upon moral education 
and the cultivation of judgment as one, and to guar- 
antee its efficacy? He did indeed exercise his 
judgment, "that universal tool," with rare inde- 
pendence. He brings it to bear on every possible 
subject, in his delightful chats with his reader. He 
would descant on military tactics, on the wars of 
Scipio and Hannibal, of Francis I and Charles V, 
with as much ease and assurance as on joy and sad- 
ness, love and friendship. He admired the military 
genius of Caesar, and his prodigious intelligence; 
but he did not hesitate to judge him severely for 
destroying the Roman Republic, thereby "rendering 
his memory abominable to all good men." He never 
abdicated his liberty of thought, faithful to the proud 
motto: "Judgment must everywhere maintain its 
rights." But was he "better and wiser" on this 
account ? He tells us he was. 

"I have seen my friends sometimes consider that 
I had the advantage of them in courage and patience, 
when my only advantage was in judgment and 
opinion." 

In his fits of stoicism, it is to his understanding 
that he appeals for help to bear with misfortune; 
he goes so far as to say that "a man of understand- 
ing loses nothing of himself, in the disasters of his 
country, in the ruin of his family." 



MONTAIGNE 71 

Thanks to his judgment, he claims to have partly 
escaped the sufferings which afflict most men: "For 
the world looks upon several things as horrible, 
which I contemplate more or less with indifference." 

More than once he put a curb to his passions, he 
resisted impulses of anger and hatred, by seeking 
for a point of support in his intelligence alone : — 

"I am but little given to those propensities which 
arise within us without any guidance or interven- 
tion of our judgment." 

Yes; but again he will say, "My affections change, 
but not my judgment." Is this not an admission 
that sensibility does not always depend on judg- 
ment, that it asserts itself without, and in spite of, 
our judgment? And he writes also, "Whatever 
excesses I ever indulged in, I condemned; for my 
judgment was not infected by them." Does he 
not then recognize that a sound judgment, even 
though it preserves us from errors of thought, does 
not always preserve us from errors of conduct? 
What does it matter if error condemns them, when 
it does not prevent them? 

Howbeit, and since judgment is, according to 
Montaigne, the dominant faculty of every well- 
trained man, 1 let us examine by what means he 

1 Full of Montaigne's teachings, Mile, de Gournay said : "Judg- 
ment raises men above beasts, Socrates over men, and God over 
Socrates." 



72 MONTAIGNE 

intends us to acquire this most precious of all quali- 
ties. What, in short, is his practical pedagogy? 

Here, Montaigne is an excellent guide, who sub- 
stitutes a natural, living, and free education to the 
artificial and abstract, mechanical and servile in- 
struction of the Middle Ages. He seems to unwrap, 
one by one, the bands in which scholasticism had 
enfolded the human mind; the mummy, immo- 
bilized in the cloths of syllogistic reasoning, seems 
to come back gradually to life and freedom. 

What he desiderates in the first place, is that 
the child's initiative should be allowed full play. 
The tutor shall allow his pupil to "trot on in front 
of him," in order to judge of his natural pace, and 
to be able thereafter to accommodate himself to it. 
Whereupon some critics exclaim, not without in- 
justice, "Education after the fashion of Montaigne 
resolves itself into nothing." * Do they wish, then, 
to return to that tyrannical education which takes 
no account of a child's bent, which oppresses him 
under the yoke of uncompromising didactic methods, 
leaving no opening, no outlet for natural forces? 
Montaigne is right, when he asks that the pupil 
shall be accustomed to think for himself, and allowed 
opportunity to speak. He is right when he pro- 

1 Cf. M. FJmile Faguet's Preface (p. xv) to the posthumous 
work of Guillaume Guizot : Montaigne, Etudes et fragments. 



MONTAIGNE 73 

scribes instruction which appeals solely to the 
memory. Although he recognizes that memory is 
a precious tool " without which judgment can 
scarcely perform its duties," he nevertheless points 
to the fact that "an excellent memory very often 
goes with a feeble judgment." It is not through 
learning by rote fine maxims, "that have been 
stamped upon his memory, to be fired off like oracles," 
that the child will achieve his intellectual and moral 
education. His reflection and intelligence should 
be appealed to early, — as early as possible. That 
his understanding may become active, it must needs 
be given full independence : — 

"Let judgment preserve its free gait; we render 
it slavish and timid if we deny it any initiative." 

Therefore, we must not overload it with formal 
teaching; we must not imitate those loquacious 
educators who do not allow their pupils time to look 
around them, and who bawl facts into their ears 
"as if they were pouring them into a funnel." 

It is through observation, through personal and 
direct experience, by frequenting men and looking 
at things, that the child will first develop his judg- 
ment. The commerce of men is marvellously fitted 
to form the mind. We know what pleasure Mon- 
taigne derived from it. He loved to converse, to 
discourse, and to "confer," on condition, however, 



74 MONTAIGNE 

that he might choose his company. "The incompar- 
able author of the Art of Conferring," as Pascal said, 
saw in this art "the most fruitful exercise of our 
mind"; and one that he considered pleasanter than 
any other action in life. In an animated and famil- 
iar conversation he found more excitement for the 
mind than in the "languid exertion of reading." 
— "We should live with those who are alive/' 
he would exclaim. And so he invited children them- 
selves to mingle in the conversations and discussions 
of the people about them, to take a share in them, 
at the risk of having to acknowledge with good grace 
any mistake due to their ignorance. He invited 
them to listen with attentive ear to all that was said 
around them. The malice of a page, the foolish 
act of some valet, a table utterance, all these offer 
opportunity for instruction. Everything should be 
to an awakening judgment an occasion for reflection 
and study: "The child should probe the ability 
of each one: cow-herd, mason, or passer-by. ..." 
That was what Montaigne did on his own account : 
after spending long hours in his library in holding 
commerce with the greatest minds of antiquity, 
he took pleasure in conversing familiarly with a 
carpenter or a joiner. 

To observe things is not less profitable than to 
converse with men : — 



MONTAIGNE 75 

"Let a child's fancy be encouraged toward a 
seemly interest in all things. Whatever striking 
objects there may be around him, let him see them: 
a building, a fountain, a man, the ground of an 
ancient battle, the spot where Caesar or Charle- 
magne passed. Those are all very pleasant things 
to learn. . . ." 

The spirit of the intuitive method, of object les- 
sons, that which will animate Froebel, Pestalozzi, 
has already breathed upon Montaigne. Far from 
isolating the child in the study of the past, he throws 
him into real life, brings him into contact with 
realities. He expects much from that gradual 
education which results from the " frequentation of 
the world," which proceeds spontaneously from the 
circumstances, the surroundings, the environment 
amid which the pupil is placed. His knowledge 
shapes itself, not abstract, ready-made, and passive, 
out of a book reeled off by heart, but living and active 
out of the facts which he observes and interprets. 
And take note that Montaigne is not content with 
a superficial and lightly made observation. He 
would seem, at times, to be the precursor of Bacon, 
and to be laying the first foundations of experimen- 
tal logic, — when he says, for instance, "It is not 
enough to number one's experiences, they should 
be weighed and set in order." 



76 MONTAIGNE 

Montaigne is far from thinking, as Rousseau was 
to do, of excluding books from education. But he 
would have them used with discretion, in modera- 
tion, and always with a view to forming the judg- 
ment. What he is fighting against is not the book, 
but the book learned by rote, the book read without 
criticism. «- 

Reading, moreover, is an occupation which, 
carried to excess, may become as painful as any 
other; if, in the commerce of books, we should lose 
our gaiety and health, "our chief assets," let us 
not hesitate, but give up our reading ! As for him, 
he likes only two kinds of books: pleasant books 
which amuse and " tickle" him, or else those which 
comfort and advise him, "for the better arrange- 
ment of his life and death." He does not say which 
books he would propose to put into children's hands, 
but at least he teaches us how those which the mas- 
ter has chosen ought to be read. Reading must 
exercise, not our memory, but our judgment. We 
should ask for an account, not only of the words 
of the text, but of "their meaning and substance." 
Such maxims may appear trite at the present day, 
but, at the time of Montaigne, they were something 
quite new. How often we have heard repeated after 
him — but the utterance originated with him — 
that in the study of history, the explanation of the 



MONTAIGNE 77 

events, and a reasoned acquaintance with the char- 
acters, are of more importance than dates or facts ! 

"Let the master bethink himself whereto his 
charge tendeth, and imprint not so much in his 
scholar's mind the date of the ruin of Carthage, as 
the manners of Hannibal and Scipio ; not so much 
where Marcellus died, as why it was unworthy of 
his duty that he should have died there; let him 
teach him not so much to know histories as to 
judge of them." 

"Exercise the judgment," such is the constant 
refrain of Montaigne's pedagogy. But an enlight- 
ened and healthy judgment should not only rule 
over our intelligence, it should become a law unto 
our actions. Wherefore the child must be schooled 
in philosophy, that is to say, in ethics. "Philosophy 
teaches us how to live." Its study is of supreme 
importance, and is also chronologically the earliest 
teaching that Montaigne presents to the child. 
"Among the liberal arts," he says, — forgetting 
that philosophy or ethics figured neither in the 
Trivium nor in the Quadrivium, — "let us begin by 
the art which makes us free," that is, by philosophy. 
" Let the first discourses in which we steep the 
child's understanding be those which regulate his 
morals and his good sense." And foreseeing the 
objection that children are too young, and that it 



78 MONTAIGNE 

is difficult to put before a dawning intelligence les- 
sons that it would be incapable of understanding, 
he endeavours to prove that "philosophy has simple 
discourses," and that a child is able to understand 
such "from the time when he returns from nurse, 
much better than he can learn to read or write." 

"It is philosophy that teacheth us to live, and 
infancy as well as other ages may plainly read her 
lessons in the same. . . . Philosophy hath dis- 
courses whereof infancy as well as decaying old 
age may make good use." 

We may treat with scepticism those somewhat 
rash affirmations. Montaigne himself is conscious 
of the difficulty. Hence he seeks means to smooth 
the somewhat rugged road along which he is leading 
the child. The tutor shall hint at the moral lesson 
rather than teach it. This lesson will be mingled 
with every action, every event of the child's life; 
— we seem already to be listening to Rousseau — " it 
will insinuate itself without making itself felt." 
Therefore, no teaching of doctrine, no formal lessons. 
Montaigne realizes that to guide us through life, to 
lead us toward action, a moral doctrine, be it ever 
so well understood, would not suffice, and that it 
must go hand in hand with practice. "It is through 
practice that we must exercise and train our soul, 
that may bear itself as we wish." The child, to be- 



MONTAIGNE 79 

come a righteous man, must go through a personal 
apprenticeship to virtue. It would be absurd, says 
Montaigne, if Le Paluel, and Pompee, " these fine 
dancers of my early days," should think "to teach 
us their steps and capers by inviting us to look on, 
without stirring from our place"; and it would be 
equally ridiculous to imagine that " one can train 
the understanding without setting it into motion." 
Let no one say, then, that Montaigne failed to appre- 
ciate the value of action, the necessity for exercising 
the will, and the influence of habit. 

"Men cannot be made brave and warlike on the 
spot, through a stirring harangue, any more than 
one becomes a musician of a sudden through hearing 
a good song. In either case proficiency must be 
acquired through a long apprenticeship, through 
long and constant training." 

The foundations of moral life, for Montaigne, are 
neither the authority of religion, nor faithful obedi- 
ence to the doctrine of such or such a philosopher, 
but personal effort. He tried to form his own life, 
to guide it, to protect it from the vicissitudes of 
fortune. "All my efforts have tended to the fash- 
ioning of my life ; such has been my trade, such the 
work I have achieved." He complains that the 
majority of men are unable to draw up a well-thought- 
out plan, a settled design, for their conduct; they 



80 MONTAIGNE 

resolve on their course of action day by day, "from 
hand to mouth." The ideal that he conceived for 
himself is perhaps shabby, inferior, marred by self- 
ishness, but after all, he had an ideal, and a plan of 
conduct. 

For the evolving of such a plan, he recommends 
to others what he practised himself: meditation, 
self-communion : — 

"Look within yourselves, know yourselves, hold 
on to yourselves. Your mind, your will, which you 
are spending elsewhere, bring it back within your- 
self. . . ." 

Pecaut, the educator of conscience, would have 
applauded. It is true that "holding on to one's self," 
when it is Montaigne who is speaking, is no guarantee 
of a very firm point of support, or of a very stable 
foundation. But at least it proves that the author 
of the Essays sought within himself, and not in some 
exterior authority, the foundation of his moral life. 
We must, he says, "establish within us a pattern 
by which we can gauge our actions." And again : — 

"Let man govern himself, respecting and fearing 
his reason and his conscience, so that he cannot 
without shame stumble in their presence. . . . 
There is a peculiar satisfaction in well-doing which 
causes us to rejoice within ourselves; this is the only 
reward which never fails us. . . . We must fol- 



MONTAIGNE 81 

low the straight road for the sake of its straightness, 
for the satisfaction which a well-regulated con- 
science derives from well-doing." 

How, after reading such words, would it be pos- 
sible still to maintain, as some people have done, 
that Montaigne "administered anaesthetics to men's 
consciences"? 

Montaigne is so thoroughly convinced that phi- 
losophy, " which fashions judgment and morals," 
ought to be the principal lesson of childhood, that 
he despairs of educating those who should show no 
taste for it. If my disciple, he says, takes no pleas- 
ure in it, if he would rather listen to a fable than to 
some wise observation, if he prefers dancing to 
fighting, "I see no other remedy but to establish 
him as confectioner in some good town, were he 
even the son of a duke." And even, thinking he 
has not said enough against the child who is rebel- 
lious to moral teaching, as if taken with a fit of rage, 
he writes in the margin of this passage, in a later 
edition, "Let his tutor twist his neck early, if there 
be no witnesses ! . . ." On that day Montaigne 
really lacked moderation. 

After all, there is perhaps no reason to be aston- 
ished that Montaigne should consider the study of 
moral philosophy as accessible to children, and even 
as more intelligible to them than "a tale from 



82 MONTAIGNE 

Boccaccio." He makes it so amiable, so playful, 
so " frolicsome." On the one hand he docks phi- 
losophy of everything that is calculated to make it 
formal and forbidding: technical expressions and 
pedantic terminology. "It is quibblers who must 
bear the blame, if philosophy appears but a vain 
and fantastic name." On the other hand, he gen- 
erally professes an amiable and easy-going moral 
doctrine, which is not hostile to pleasure; it loves 
life, beauty, glory, and health. Consequently, it 
would be as easy for the pupil to accomplish duty 
as it is for the master to teach its rules. "The re- 
ward of virtue lies therein, that it is so easy, useful, 
and pleasant to practise." 

Never did Montaigne's fluctuating thought un- 
consciously abandon itself more to contradictions, 
to sudden changes of view, than in the successive 
definitions which he gives of morality and of virtue. 
Was it to crave forgiveness for these that he com- 
plained so often of his treacherous memory ? But it 
is not from one chapter to another, it is in the same 
Essay, at a few lines' distance, that he contradicts 
himself without seeming to notice it. He has just 
said of the lofty virtue of Socrates that it was nat- 
ural to him, that to practise it he had not had to 
fight with evil instincts, and he admires him for that 
spontaneous wisdom, to which nature had opposed 



MONTAIGNE 83 

no obstacle. Now, a little further on, he writes: 
" Socrates used to admit to those who discerned 
in his countenance some inclination to vice, that 
such was, in truth, his natural propensity, but that 
he had cured it through self-discipline." 

A more serious contradiction is that which brings 
epicureanism and stoicism into conflict within 
Montaigne himself. How often he has celebrated 
an easy and amiable virtue, which "preaches only 
feasting and good living, and constant merry- 
making." He is angry that virtue should be clothed 
in sable, "a foolish and ugly dress." He likes wis- 
dom to be cheerful. He avoids " rigidity and aus- 
terity of living, and holds all surly countenances in 
suspicion." He hates those cross-grained and mo- 
rose minds which ignore the pleasures of life. And 
smitten with real poetic fury, he sings, in a well- 
known passage, a hymn to the Virtue of his dreams : 
to "Virtue, who gloriously, as on a throne of majesty, 
sits sovereign, goodly, triumphant, lovely, equally 
delicious and courageous, professing herself to be 
an irreconcilable enemy to all sourness, austerity, 
fear, and compulsion ; having Nature for her guide, 
Fortune and Voluptuousness for her companions," 
etc. 1 Montaigne grows intoxicated with his own 
words; similes and epithets shine and burst forth 

1 Essays, Book I, Chap. XXV. 



84 MONTAIGNE 

in a magnificent flight of sparkling language. But 
how comes it that after discoursing on the " paths 
of wisdom, shady and flowery, and soft to tread on," 
the same philosopher changes his mind to the extent 
of writing that " virtue refuses to take ease for a 
companion"; that "this easy, soft, and gently 
sloping path, along which a naturally good inclina- 
tion guides its steps," is not that of true virtue; 
and that in short the latter demands " a rugged and 
thorny path" ? It is Zeno, whom he calls "the fore- 
most man of the foremost philosophic school, and 
fit to teach all others," that Montaigne now takes 
for his guide. It is the virtue of the Stoics which 
he is extolling, that which "rings out something 
greater and more active," and to attain to which 
it is not enough "through a happy disposition, 
gently and peacefully to walk in the footsteps of 
reason." 

We must not expect from Montaigne a complete 
and precise plan of studies, nor ask him for more 
than he promised us. He warned us himself that 
he would have but little to say on teaching properly 
so called, ' ' forasmuch as he could add nothing of any 
moment to it." It is only by the way, and in few 
words, that he mentions any other studies than 
philosophy. And he commits the grave blunder of 
putting them off until the day when the child's 



MONTAIGNE 85 

judgment shall have been formed. Then only shall 
he be taught "what is meant by logic, physics, 
geometry, rhetoric." Those are assuredly very 
short-sighted views. Montaigne forgets that those 
special studies, in a well-understood pedagogical 
system, can and ought to be the very instruments 
of the education of the mind; that they form an 
essential part of "mental gymnastics" ; that "object 
lessons" and familiar talks on ethical subjects can- 
not suffice to enlighten the reason, and to stock 
the mind with the necessary knowledge; that the 
intelligence requires that more substantial nourish- 
ment which can only be provided by the general and 
abstract truths contained in the various literary 
and scientific subjects of education. 

Montaigne has been reproached, not without 
reason, with having strangely restricted the part 
which science ought to play in education, and hav- 
ing given it too modest a place in his school pro- 
gramme. Nor would it be a sufficient excuse to urge 
that in his days science could hardly be said to exist. 
It was equally non-existent at the time of Rabelais, 
and yet the latter, in a prophetic vision of the future, 
put down on his programme, as if they had already 
accomplished their work, all the branches of natural 
science. No, we must admit that it is Montaigne's 
tendency — anxious as he is before aught else to 



86 MONTAIGNE 

shape his pupil's moral nature — to despise pure 
science, that which affords no help, no rules, for our 
practical conduct in life, and which ' ' often goes to use- 
less lengths or useless depths in its considerations." 
It should be of no moment to us, he says, whether 
Copernicus is right or Ptolemy. Anything of the 
nature of a speculative problem interests him but 
little. We are "very simple" to teach our children 
the science of heavenly bodies, before the science of 
man. And yet, let us beware; it is especially false 
science, verbal learning, undigested erudition, which 
he attacks : — 

' ' I love and honour learning as much as those who 
have it, and, put to its proper use, it is the most 
noble and powerful acquisition of man; but with 
regard to those (and their number is legion) who 
rely for their understanding on their memory, and 
who are helpless without their book-learning, I hate 
them, if I dare say so, rather more than stupidity 
itself. . . . Doctrine is a most useful accessory 
to a well-born soul; to another soul it may be per- 
nicious and hurtful; ... in some hands, it is a 
sceptre, in others a fool's bauble. ..." 

So that Montaigne's contemptuous indifference, 
his hostility, are directed less against science as such 
than against science ill-practised, and put to wrong 
uses in education. He gives it a place in his school 



MONTAIGNE 87 

programme. Rabelais said to his pupil, "In short, 
let me see abysmal depths of science." Does not 
Montaigne express very much the same thing when 
he says, of the physical universe, "In short, I 
would have it be my scholar's book"? But even 
in this study of the universe, Montaigne continues to 
pursue his moral and practical ideal. If he asks that 
man should understand nature in general, it is that 
he may admire its "great and sovereign majesty," 
in order the better to realize what a small place he 
holds in it, and to understand that his ambitions 
should be in conformity with his humble destiny. 
The study of nature, like the frequentation of men, 
like the commerce of books, like all and every study, 
in short, should be but a school for judgment, and 
for moral judgment in the first place. 

Montaigne, although so thoroughly conversant 
with Latin that the Latinist Muret "feared to tackle 
him," was one of the first to shake off the yoke of 
Latinism: "Greek and Latin are very fine things, 
no doubt, but we pay too dearly for their acquisi- 
tion. ..." We know how he had himself learned 
the Latin tongue. "Before the first unloosening of 
his tongue," he had been intrusted by his father to 
masters who spoke only Latin to him. The castle of 
Montaigne had become, so to speak, a small village 
university; and also a school of music, since musi- 



88 MONTAIGNE 

cians were intrusted with the duty of preparing 
every morning a pleasant awakening for the child. 
Parents, valets, chambermaids even, every one 
around him jabbered in Latin. At six years of age 
he knew not a word of French, nor of the Perigord 
dialect. Is this method, which had made Latin 
Montaigne's mother tongue, the right one ? Mon- 
taigne himself does not think so. On this point he 
does not allow the recollection of his own education 
to influence him; nay, perhaps his personal ex- 
perience had taught him the drawbacks of the sys- 
tem, more ingenious than wise, which his father had 
imagined. At all events, he declares most emphati- 
cally that Latin should only be learned after French, 
and even after "modern" languages. "I should 
like, in the first place, to be thoroughly conversant 
with my own language and that of my neighbours." 

The dead languages are therefore relegated to a 
secondary position. Hitherto, they have taken 
up too much time, and been studied too mechani- 
cally. Their study should be simplified and made 
easier, with a minimum of grammar. Montaigne 
had no love for grammarians. It was his boast that 
he himself had learned languages only by practice, 
without knowing the rules. "I know not what is 
meant by adjective, conjunctive, or ablative. . . ." 

This lofty contempt for grammar was allowable 



MONTAIGNE 89 

in a great writer, who created his own language. 
But the liberties which he takes, and to which he 
partly owes much that is natural or novel in his 
language, can evidently not be put before common 
men as models for imitation. His rhetoric is that 
of nature. Art and especially artifice are rigidly 
proscribed. Montaigne cares nothing for order and 
composition in his discourse. " Whether it come 
early or late, a useful maxim, a fine example, is 
always seasonable." Self-complacent with regard 
to his own faults, he ingenuously erects into rules 
the disorderly habits of his own thought. In his 
considerations on the qualities of style, it is a por- 
trait which he draws, the portrait of his own 
peculiar style, rather than an ideal model that could 
be recommended to all. He desiderates "a simple, 
artless, and unaffected speech"; very good; but 
he does not hesitate to add that he likes it " un- 
ruly and desultory " ; and in this he really agrees too 
heartily with his own peculiarities. 

Montaigne gave health the first place among 
earthly blessings: /'Health is a precious thing, 
and the only one which deserves that life should be 
given up to its pursuit." How could he have failed 
to recognize the importance of physical education? 
Hygiene already occupies his thoughts. He laments 
that modern peoples have lost the habit of ' ' washing 



90 MONTAIGNE 

their bodies daily," a custom which was formerly 
universally observed. In these matters, Montaigne 
likes to quote as an example his father, of whom 
he says that " there hardly ever was a man of his 
condition to equal him in all bodily exercises." 
Endowed with rare muscular strength, the older 
Montaigne seems to have indulged in parlour acro- 
batics, and could "go round his table on his thumb. " 
It is true that his son had not inherited his physical 
strength. He was a "very fair runner," but con- 
fesses his unfitness for other bodily exercises. He 
could neither swim nor fence, at a time when his con- 
temporaries went in crowds to learn fencing in Italy, 
where his own brother fought a duel. He could 
"hardly dance." He complains of his clumsy and 
"benumbed" hands. On the other hand, he was 
an excellent horseman. He could spend fifteen 
hours in the saddle without fatigue. His journey 
in Italy was a long ride on horseback. If Venice 
did not appeal to him, it was perhaps because in the 
town of gondolas "there is not a single horse." 
"Ideas," he says, "come to me at table, but es- 
pecially on horseback." And he goes the length of 
saying, "I would rather be a good horseman than a 
good logician." 

Montaigne was too thoroughly impressed with the 
fact that the physical and the moral being are closely 



MONTAIGNE 91 

bound up in each other, to neglect the education of 
the body. 

"The body has a large share in our being. . . . 
Those who would separate our two principal com- 
ponents and hold them apart, are wrong: on the 
contrary, they should be coupled and joined together ; 
we should order our soul, not to stand aloof and 
despise the body, but to rally to it, to embrace it, 
cherish it, assist it, control it, advise it, to take it 
for a mate, in short, that their effects may not 
appear different and contradictory, but uniformly 
agree. . . ." 

Without indulging, like Rabelais' pupil, in an orgy 
of gymnastics, Montaigne's pupil will know that to 
fortify his soul, he must begin by "stiffening his 
muscles." He will practise running, wrestling, 
dancing, hunting, learn to handle horses and weapons. 
He will expose himself to cold, to heat; will laugh 
at the precepts of medicine; he will inure himself 
to hardships, as the pupil of Locke will do later; 
he will harden himself against fatigue and pain. 
" It is not a body nor a soul that you are training, but 
a man." That is one of Montaigne's reasons for ob- 
jecting to domestic education: a child who is kept 
on his mother's lap grows up soft and effeminate. 
The soul must not be obliged to groan and labour 
in the company of too tender and sensitive a body. 



92 MONTAIGNE 

The child must be brought up roughly, and exposed 
to danger; and Montaigne, carried beyond all 
bounds by his theory, goes the length of authorizing, 
nay, encouraging in the young man excesses of 
every kind. "Even in debauchery I would have 
him outdo his companions." Better inspired, he will 
say elsewhere : "Let him be able to do all things, but 
let him love to do only what is good." 

Montaigne said: "Even though I could make 
myself feared, I would rather make myself loved." 
This is the feeling which inspires him in his ideas 
on scholastic discipline. Here, again, he takes up 
vigorously the fight begun by Rabelais. He attacks 
and denounces the severe and brutal government of 
the colleges of his time, that which he underwent 
at the "College de Guyenne," a government made up 
of violence and tyranny, of horror and cruelty. He 
prohibits any severity in the education of a free 
soul. He mocks at masters who lose their temper 
with their pupils, after the manner of those "who 
shout before the culprit has come into their presence, 
and go on shouting for an eternity after he has 
withdrawn." He complains that in the bosom of 
the family children are punished too severely for 
"innocent mistakes"; that they are tormented out 
of season for "bold acts," for faults without con- 
sequence. The only failings which he insists must 



MONTAIGNE 93 

be energetically repressed are lying and stubborn- 
ness." In public education, without inclining 
toward excessive indulgence, he wishes a "mild 
severity" to be the watchword of school discipline. 
He would do away with corporal punishment : — 

"I have never seen the birch have any other effect 
but to make souls more craven and more maliciously 
stubborn." 

He dreams of educational establishments, where 
"Gladness and the Graces" would be painted on the 
walls to cheer the children; where joy would reign 
as a reality in the class-room ; where "dancing, games, 
leaping, and summersaults" would alternate with 
studies, attractive withal, and pursued without con- 
straint. Less work, the whip abolished, pleasant 
lessons, in which the master invites his pupils to 
voluntary and easy efforts, violence and rough han- 
dling done away with; such cheerful and gentle 
discipline is the ideal which Montaigne wishes to see 
applied to the education "of those delicate and 
tender souls which we have to train toward honour 
and liberty." 

Montaigne entertained no very flattering opinion 
of the nature of women, "of their ill-regulated mind, 
their morbid tastes, and their inherent weakness," 
so we cannot expect from him any broad-minded or 
lofty conception of feminine education. He criti- 



94 MONTAIGNE 

cises the "Armandes," or blue-stockings of his time, 
but cannot even conceive the ideal of an "Hen- 
riette" with an "enlightened mind" on all subjects. 1 
He scoffs at those of his fair contemporaries who lay 
claim to wit and erudition: "They quote Plato and 
St. Thomas in matters wherein the testimony of the 
man in the street would avail as much." Is not this 
what he did himself, in his constant quotations? 
Rhetoric, logic, science in general, are to them "use- 
less drugs." Rhetoric would serve them only "to 
hide their fairness under beauties that are foreign 
to them." In the concessions he makes regarding 
the studies he is willing to allow them, there enters 
nearly as much contempt as in the prohibitions 
which he puts on them. 

"If, however, they cannot brook being obliged to 
yield the palm to us in any respect, if they are curious 
of books and literature, poetry is a pastime fitted to 
their needs ; it is a gay and subtle art, a many-worded 
and dissembling art, entirely made up of pleasure, 
and as showy as women themselves. ..." 

He will allow women some knowledge of history 
and of moral philosophy, but assigns a narrow aim 
to these studies, and a practical bearing on their 
conduct. 

1 The references are to characters in Moliere's " Les Femmes 
Savantes." (Translator's note.) 



MONTAIGNE 95 

"They will draw from these studies various useful 
lessons : they will learn to spin out the pleasures of 
life, and to bear with human fortitude the inconstancy 
of a servant, the rough bearing of a husband, and 
the importunity of years and of wrinkles. ..." 

In short, woman shall study — if study she must, 
— what is necessary to teach her patience, resigna- 
tion, and obedience. Of her general culture and per- 
sonal development Montaigne says not a word. 
He is of those who would pay their court to woman 
by maintaining her in ignorance, lest learning should 
be prejudicial to her natural charms. On this point, 
indeed, he quotes the authority of the Church in 
support of his mean and shabby views: " Neither 
we nor theology require much science in women." 
Yet Montaigne ought to have understood the neces- 
sity for a strong and serious feminine education, 
since he was conscious of the drawbacks and dangers 
of the frivolous training which was then in fashion : 

"We bring up girls from childhood so that they 
may be expert in love ; their graceful bearing, their 
adornment, their science, their speech, their whole 
education is directed to that one end. . . ." 

What Montaigne lacked above all things to be a 
true educator was a love for childhood. He was 
too fond of peace to enjoy the company of children, 
even of his own. "I could not brook having them 



96 MONTAIGNE 

reared near me." He would easily have done with- 
out offspring. 

" Children are among the things which are in no 
wise very desirable, particularly at this time when it 
would be so difficult to make them good. . . ." 

If he barricaded himself, so to speak, in his library, 
in order to avoid the society of men and to live with 
himself, how could he have opened the gates of his 
ivory tower to the noisy and uncomfortable turbu- 
lence of children? He did not understand their 
charm, blind as he was to the graces and pretty 
ways of those frail creatures, as they come into being, 
though one of our contemporaries has said: "What 
glimpses of Paradise are left to us on earth are due 
to the presence of children." Montaigne, on the 
contrary, waves them roughly out of his sight, unable 
to understand "the passion with which people kiss 
and fondle children hardly born," unable to find 
either in their souls or in their bodies "anything 
that renders them amiable." 

He will not allow a mother to suckle her own child ; 
he will not even have a foster-mother in the house. 
Reared himself in a village, and in mercenary hands, 
he is determined that his daughters also shall spend 
their early years far from their parents. 

Montaigne, it must be confessed, was but little 
acquainted with that laborious virtue which curbs 



MONTAIGNE 97 

our humours under the yoke of duty, which makes 
us watch overnight, and slave by day, in the service 
of those whom we love; tasks which become easy 
for the very reason that we love them. It is only 
when the child has grown that he consents to admit 
him to his society : — 

"I would not avoid the company of my children. 
I should wish to act as their close adviser, and to 
enjoy the sight of their merriment and holiday- 
making. I should endeavour, by pleasant conversa- 
tion, to foster in my children a lively and unfeigned 
affection for me. . . . That father is greatly to 
be pitied whose only hold on his children's affection 
is the need which they have of his help. . . . We 
must win respect through virtue, and love through 
kindness. ..." 

With young men, therefore, Montaigne becomes 
an affectionate father, because he finds pleasure in 
their society. Had he been blessed with any sons, 
he would, he says, have treated them kindly when 
their twentieth year drew nigh; he would have 
initiated them early to the family affairs, he would 
have dispossessed himself in their favour of a part of 
his estates, without waiting for the hour of testa- 
ments and death. 

Montaigne does not seem to have had much feeling 
for the beauties of nature. He looks with more 



98 MONTAIGNE 

admiration on the fair Italian women whom he sees 
in the streets in Florence, and at the windows in 
Rome, than on the great Alpine landscapes of the 
Tyrol mountain passes. In any case, he prefers 
a pretty countryside to the awe-inspiring aspects of 
rugged nature. After he has "made a plunge" 
into the Alps, he is delighted to find himself once 
more on the pleasant banks of the Adige, "when the 
mountains have lowered their horns a little." Just 
as among men he prefers those of a " temperate and 
average character," thus also in nature he prefers 
hills of moderate height, graceful sites, the "pleas- 
ant little meadows within the valleys." He ad- 
mires the torrents of the Apennines especially when, 
"having lost their first fury, they become in the 
vales peaceful and gentle streamlets." Amidst 
high mountains, he likes best their green slopes with 
tilled fields, and villages nestling within their folds; 
and this sight suggests to him a most ingenious 
simile : — 

"The ridges of the Tyrol mountains resemble 
a gown which one only sees crumpled up, but which, 
unfolded and stretched out flat, would form a great 
country, if all these mountains were under cultiva- 
tion and inhabited. ..." 

He is also pleased to find among these mountains 
"pleasant and comfortable roads," along which one 



MONTAIGNE 99 

may ride at ease; "so much so," he says, "that if 
he had to escort his daughter on her walks (Leonor 
was then eight years old), he would as lief do so on 
these roads as in an avenue of his gardens at Mon- 
taigne/' — a passing thought given to his family 
which we note with pleasure in a somewhat neg- 
lectful father. 

Neither is a feeling for art at all prominent in 
Montaigne. Even while travelling in Italy, he hardly 
seems to have felt the breath of the artistic Renais- 
sance passing over his head. In vain had Michael 
Angelo and Raphael adorned the Eternal City with 
the novelty of their works. Montaigne passed on 
negligently without noticing them. And when, in 
an eloquent page of his Diary, he speaks of Rome, 
it is ancient Rome, the memories of the past, which 
he alone calls up : — 

"He said that of Rome nothing was to be seen 
but the heavens under which it had been seated, and 
the outlines of the spot where it had lain ; that this 
science which he had of ancient Rome was an ab- 
stract and contemplative science, nothing of which 
came under the senses ; that those who said that at 
least the ruins of Rome were to be seen, asserted 
too much ; for the ruins of so awesome a handiwork 
would bring more honour and reverence to its mem- 
ory; this, he said, was naught but the sepulchre 

Lore 



100 MONTAIGNE 

of Rome. The world, rising against her long domi- 
nation, had first broken and shattered every piece 
of that admirable body, and because, although 
dead, overthrown and disfigured, it was still awe- 
inspiring, they had buried its very ruins. What- 
ever slight tokens of the ruin of Rome still appear 
above her bier, had been preserved, he said, by fate as 
a testimony to that infinite greatness which so many 
centuries, so many conflagrations, and the oft-re- 
peated coalitions of the world to compass its ruin, 
had been unable to extinguish at all points. ..." 

Little touched by the embellishments of the new 
Rome, he said : — 

"The buildings of this bastard Rome, which are 
now being fastened on these ruins, put me in mind 
of the nests which the sparrows and daws attach 
in France to the vaults of the churches which the 
Huguenots have just been wrecking." 

Fine arts, plastic arts, therefore left Montaigne 
more or less indifferent. In Rome, however, the 
statues attract his attention; and he enumerates 
those which he admired most in the palace of the 
Cardinal of Ferrara. But he has hardly anything 
to say on the paintings ; and what he does say be- 
trays singular prejudices, since he will not even allow 
that painting is in the least capable of representing 
nature : — 



MONTAIGNE 101 

"All our efforts cannot even succeed in picturing 
the nest of a little bird, with its texture and beauty, 
nor even the web of a puny spider. ..." 

Let us note, however, a theory which is of interest 
in art, and which, although expressed in a couple 
of lines, is pregnant with consequences: "I would 
naturalize art," — and he added, coining a word 
which neither lived nor deserved to live: "instead 
of artialising nature." — Montaigne thus associated 
himself with the movement which, during the last 
centuries of the Middle Ages, had already carried 
architects, cathedral sculptors, and miniature paint- 
ers beyond artistic stagnation and traditional con- 
ventionality, and had led them to inaugurate a new 
art by introducing movement and life into it through 
the imitation of nature. Let us note also that 
Montaigne would have approved of the effort which 
is being made at the present time to provide schools 
and class-rooms with a cheerful and artistic setting, 
which surrounds the child with an atmosphere of 
beauty. He asked that the class-rooms should be 
strewn with flowers. He wished to see the walls 
adorned with the pictures of "Gladness and Joy, 
of Flora and the Graces." 

Whatever may have been the lacunae in Mon- 
taigne's mind, he came very near being a complete 
man. His pedagogy is open to nature and to life, 
as he wished works of art to be. It is at fault, how- 



102 MONTAIGNE 

ever, in that it remains rather superficial, easy-going, 
and slight. Montaigne is a thinker and a writer of 
genius, and men of genius are perhaps not best 
fitted to become educators. Everything is easy 
to them : the resources of their rich nature dispense 
them from effort; hence they do not think of re- 
quiring it in others. They forget that the common 
herd of men do not enjoy the same faculties. Hav- 
ing reached without labour and without trouble the 
highest peaks of intellectual and moral life, they 
do not take into consideration that, even to rise 
midway to these heights, those who labour in the 
valley require a more intensive education and a 
harder discipline. 1 

Montaigne is none the less a wise counsellor, whose 
lessons will always be profitable. Between Eras- 
mus, the erudite humanist, exclusively in love with 
belles-lettres, and Rabelais, the bold dreamer, who 
seems intent on cramming the whole encyclopaedia 
of human knowledge into the brain of his disciple, — 
who was a giant, it is true, — at the risk of causing 
it to burst, Montaigne occupies an intermediate 
place, with his circumspect and moderate tendencies, 
averse to any excess. 

1 "Are we not all sons of Montaigne," said Felix Pecaut, who 
complained of it, "sons of Montaigne by the absolute freedom 
of our minds, but also by our disposition to look with indifference 
on the most various opinions?" (Revue pedagogique, 1888, 
Vol. I, p. 216.) 



MONTAIGNE 103 

The child who has followed Montaigne's lessons 
will be above all clear-minded; he will possess a 
solid and acute judgment, a prudent and upright 
character. He will have tasted, like his master, 
"only the outer crust of science." But he will 
have surveyed the whole field of knowledge, lightly, 
u a la frangaise" ; this expression is indeed surpris- 
ing from the pen of a sixteenth-century writer, at 
the close of the Middle Ages, whose logicians, truly, 
in no way announced the amiable lightness of mind 
of the French people. He will be a man devoted 
to duty, or at least a man of honour. Although averse 
to vain ceremony, he will show himself on all occa- 
sions polite and civil, prodigal of salutations, ever 
ready to " raise his bonnet"; especially in summer, 
because there is less risk of catching a cold in that 
season. . . . More important still, he will be a 
mild and tolerant man, independent in his ideas and 
straightforward in his speech. "Lying is the worst 
of faults." What he may lack, a little, will be the 
qualities of the heart. If Montaigne is silent with 
regard to the qualities of the heart, we are far from 
thinking with Guizot that this redounds to his honour. 
He will also lack a taste for action ; and lastly, what 
Rabelais and the men of the Renaissance for the 
most part possessed to the highest degree: faith 
in science, enthusiasm, and confidence in the future. 



Ill 

Montaigne's Influence 

"If we believe everything that Montaigne advises, 
and do all that he recommends, we may need to add 
thereto, and to take the pupil somewhat further than 
he did : but we must pass by the road which he took ; 
if he did not say all, all that he did say is true, and 
before we may pretend to outstrip him, we must 
endeavour to overtake [him." Thus spoke Guizot 
in 1812, not without some exaggeration, in the 
Annates de V Education. 1 Indeed, long before the 
nineteenth century, many of Montaigne's pedagogic 
views were fully appreciated, and taken as sources 
of inspiration. Locke, Rousseau, borrowed largely 
from him. The Solitaires, or recluses of Port-Royal, 
in their Logic, put him under contribution, though 
they omitted any acknowledgment or thanks. 
Montaigne is really the chief of a school, as an Eng- 
lish writer, Herbert Quick, proclaims in his Educa- 
tional Reformers, where he declares that the author 

1 Montaigne's Ideas on Education, an article that has often 
been reprinted, and particularly in Conseils d'un Pere sur V Edu- 
cation, Paris, 1883. 

104 



MONTAIGNE 105 

of the Essays founded, in the field of pedagogy, a 
school of thinkers, the principal adherents to which, 
in later times, were Locke and Rousseau. 1 - In Ger- 
many, several editions of Montaigne's pedagogical 
Essays have been published. 2 On all sides, due 
homage has been rendered to the merit of a pedagogy 
made up of good sense and wisdom, which paved the 
way for a more liberal and a broader education. 
Without aspiring to it, Montaigne has become one 
of the masters of human thought. 

It is true that it is his work taken as a whole, even 
more than his short pedagogical sketch, which calls 
forth the almost unanimous admiration of his critics. 
Sainte-Beuve, imagining posterity as escorting Mon- 
taigne's funeral, introduces into the procession the 
most illustrious French writers: La Fontaine and 
Moliere, Montesquieu and J.-J. Rousseau, Voltaire 
also, and many others. Did not Mme. de Sevigne 
exclaim: "Ah! what an amiable man! And how 
full of good sense his book is ! " 

To this throng of admirers must be added a num- 
ber of foreign thinkers. Thus the American writer 
Emerson gives him a place in his gallery of Represen- 

1 Educational Reformers, latest edition, Cincinnati, 1883. 

2 For instance, the edition of E. Schmidt in the Library of 
Pedagogical Classics, Langensalza, 1876. Cf. also the editions 
of Karl Reimer (1872), of Schippard (1880), and the study on 
Montaigne by Wittslock (1874). 



106 MONTAIGNE 

tative Men. 1 Beside Plato, "the Philosopher," 
and Shakespeare, "the Poet," Montaigne is pictured 
as "the Sceptic"; and Emerson wreathes him with 
flowers: "I remember the delight and wonder in 
which I lived with it" (i.e. an odd volume of 
Cotton's translation of the Essays). 

Beside Emerson we must place Byron, of whom 
it was said 2 that Montaigne was the only great writer 
of past times whom he read with avowed satisfac- 
tion. 

An even more unexpected testimony is that of 
Nietzsche, who, in that period of his intellectual 
evolution when he conceived a taste for the clear- 
ness of thought of French literature, celebrated 
the "charming loquacity" of Montaigne. 3 

People have not been content to read and admire 
Montaigne ; they have taken up his thoughts, copied 
them, and developed them. 

It was not Pascal, but Montaigne, who wrote: 
1 ' He who imagines, as in a painting, this great picture 
of Mother Nature in her full majesty, and who, in 
this picture, looks upon himself, and not upon himself 
alone, but upon a whole kingdom, as a small stroke 

1 Translated into French by M. Izoulet, under the title of 
Les Surhumains. Montaigne is not superhuman, as M. Izoulet 
would have it, but he is a thoroughly representative man. 

2 By Leigh Hunt, quoted by Emerson. (Translator's note.) 

3 Cf . E. Faguet's recent book: En lisant Nietzsche. 



MONTAIGNE 107 

made with a very fine point, that one alone judges 
of things in their right proportions. . . ." 

It was not Descartes, but again Montaigne, who 
said: "That you can put nothing into a pupil's 
head simply by quoting some authority, and so to 
speak on credit ... ;" or again: — 

"When the Pyrrhonians affirm their doubt, we 
immediately take them by the throat to force them 
to confess that this much at least they know: that 
they doubt." 

It was not Rousseau, but Montaigne again, who 
declared that "to refine the mind is not to make it 
wiser," and elsewhere : — 

"The study of science weakens our courage and 
renders it effeminate, far more than it strengthens it 
and inures it to war." — "I think Rome fought 
better before she grew learned." 

And likewise, do we not think we are listening 
to Fenelon, when we read in the Essays : "Education 
should be conducted with a gentle severity"? — or 
again, to Locke, in such a passage as this: "Harden 
the child against perspiration and cold, against the 
wind, the sun, and the dangers which he ought to 
look down upon." 

One single work sufficed to acquire for Montaigne 
immortal renown. In that extraordinary success, 
we must assuredly ascribe a share to the delightful 



108 MONTAIGNE 

style. Never did a man speak a language that was 
so new, so savoury, so supple and rich, very French 
withal, with a spice of the Gascon idiom. Mon- 
taigne is one of the creators of the French language. 
How many new words he coined, a number of which 
have survived ! Picturesque expressions flow in an 
endless stream under his pen. Metaphors abound, 
metaphors that are new, rather than those i{ whose 
beauty has taken on the wrinkles of age." Nearly 
always the concrete image takes the place of the ab- 
straction. "Cut these words," said Emerson, "and 
they would bleed; they are vascular and alive." 
Moreover, in the fresh novelty of that flowery 
language which blooms in full liberty, the boldness 
of the construction, the contempt for syntax, con- 
tribute to the seduction of a style both picturesque 
and poetical. Did not Montesquieu, who believed 
that even in prose, we can be a poet, put Montaigne 
among "the four great poets," with Plato, Male- 
branche, and Shaftesbury? The lack of order and 
arrangement, the desultoriness even of a thought 
which proceeds at random, without obeying any 
regular plan, are not without their attractiveness. 
Montaigne was no lover of continuous discourse: 
"I pause often for lack of breath." "A glimpse of 
a tuft of fur " crossing his path was enough to lead 
him off on a charming digression from his main 



MONTAIGNE 109 

theme. The Essays resemble a collection of "news 
paragraphs/' written by a journalist of great talent, 
at a time when journalism was non-existent. So 
that one should not attempt to read the Essays 
from end to end, as one reads a book of continuous 
and methodical doctrine. To enjoy all their charm 
and admire them unreservedly, one should read them 
in fragments, day by day, as they were written. 
They should be taken in small sips, so to speak. 
We can then enjoy to the full the "flow of gossip" 
of the wittiest of talkers; and appreciate the sim- 
plicity, the familiarity of conversation, of a writer 
who "talks to his paper as he would talk to any one," 
and of whom it was also Montesquieu who said, 
"In most authors, I see the author who writes; in 
Montaigne I see a man who thinks." 

Original in his style, Montaigne is no less so in 
his ideas. I know, and he in no wise concealed, that 
he owes much to the writers of antiquity. "My 
book is a bunch of flowers for which I have provided 
only the thread." He often struts in borrowed 
feathers, and he used to say, ' ' I wish some one would 
pluck the feathers off me, " thus hinting that, if he 
were once stripped of all he had borrowed, there 
would remain little or nothing of the Essays. There 
would remain all the fine embroidery which an im- 
pulsive imagination worked on to the rough ground 



110 MONTAIGNE 

of other people's thoughts, without reckoning all 
the new ideas that belong to him alone. Through 
all his reminiscences and his overflow of quotations 
from the poets, historians, and philosophers of Greece 
and Rome, there blows a modern spirit, and Mon- 
taigne's personality stands out on every page. He 
claimed his share of originality when he said that 
he used books, "not to shape his opinions, but to 
assist and support them, when once they were 
formed." 

u In the books I read I am ever on the lookout 
for something to pilfer, that may serve to jewel or 
shore up my own." 

If some chapters of the Essays, by their titles at 
least, are merely recollections of the short moral 
treatises which the philosophers of antiquity have 
left us, — Of Anger, Of Constancy, Of Virtue, — 
others are, so to speak, the first sketches of some of 
the books which have been written within the last 
three centuries by the most famous of our thinkers 
and philosophers ; such are, for instance, the essays 
entitled, Of Liberty of Conscience, Of Roman Great- 
ness. And is it not a fact that Pascal's Pensees, or 
Thoughts, had their origin in the famous chapter 
entitled Apology of Raymond Sebond ? Montaigne 
is, so to speak, the middleman between ancient 
thought and modern thought. He makes antiquity 



MONTAIGNE 111 

live again, and at the same time, by his novel and 
bold views, he opens a new era; and this, it would 
seem, without being conscious of it, for this man of 
progress does not believe in progress. He is a 
precursor without knowing it. 

Montaigne had little faith either in the progress 
of the individual or in the progress of society. At 
the age of twenty, according to him, a human soul 
is " released from its ties," being already all that it 
is capable of becoming. In another passage, he 
fixes the age of thirty as a limit for the evolution 
of the individual ; and he recalls the fact that most 
great men had accomplished their glorious actions 
before that age. He quotes himself as an example, 
and says that since his thirtieth year, "his mind, 
like his body, has gone back rather than advanced." 
The most that he will concede is that for those who 
make good use of their time, "Knowledge and 
experience increase with life;" but sharpness of 
mind, promptness and firmness of judgment, 
" those faculties which are far more ours, more im- 
portant and more essential, fade and languish." 

Montaigne — untrue in this respect to the spirit 
of the Renaissance — does not believe, either, in the 
collective progress of humanity. He neither be- 
lieves in it, nor even desires it. He would like 
"to put a peg into our wheel to stop its motion." 



112 MONTAIGNE 

And yet he prepared that progress in which he had 
no faith. His book is full of progressive views on 
the most diverse matters. Is he not in advance 
of his time by that spirit of tolerance which made 
him condemn the fanaticism of his contemporaries ? 
It was on the morrow of the St. Bartholomew 
massacre that he wrote, "We put a very high value 
on our conjectures when we authorize ourselves of 
them to roast a man alive." Does he not condemn 
the rack, and death by torture, which were still to 
endure for generations? He is a humanitarian, in 
that age of savage cruelty of which La Noue could 
say, "The French are changed into tigers;" and 
Henry IV, "We are always ready to cut each other's 
throats." He has "a cruel hatred of cruelty." 
He waxes indignant at the abominable sights which 
he has the grief of witnessing. 

"We have seen neighbours and fellow-citizens, 
under the cloak of piety and religion, torture and 
tear to pieces a body full of feeling, roast him on 
a slow fire, and leave him to be bitten and devoured 
by dogs and swine." 

If he does not seem to suspect the future flights of 
science, he foresees that on some points at least the 
future is destined to modify and improve the present 
state of things. We have seen how roughly he 
handled medicine, with the irritation of an invalid 



MONTAIGNE 113 

whom doctors are unable to cure, even though they 
prescribe for the calculus which he suffered from 
such fantastic remedies as " powdered rat's drop- 
pings! ..." And yet he prophesies that a day 
will come when medicine will render real services 
to humanity, the day when each branch of medi- 
cine has become specialized, and when there will be 
a competent doctor for each kind of disease. 

Montaigne does not remain absorbed in the ideal- 
istic meditations of philosophical dilettantism. He 
is already a practical man, with a thought for useful 
arts, interested in commerce and industry. In 
his travels, he studies and compares the different 
systems of healing, the state of the public fountains. 
He is as anxious to understand the working of a 
hydraulic machine as to visit public libraries, art 
galleries, or churches. In the towns of Germany, 
he notes that our neighbours "have got iron and good 
Workmen in abundance, and that they are far ahead 
of us." France was already outdistanced by Ger- 
many. He inquires about the institutions which 
may facilitate commercial life; he would like to 
see in every town a central information office, a 
kind of labour exchange. 

The prejudices of a narrow patriotism are unknown 
to Montaigne. The love he bore to his "wretched 
country" did not prevent him from doing justice 



114 MONTAIGNE 

to other nations. Like Socrates, he might have said, 
"I am not a citizen of Athens, I am a citizen of the 
world." He sees with "infinite pleasure" the 
efficient policing, the simple way of living, and the 
freedom of Switzerland. He has a better opinion 
of the Italians than of the French; he thinks " their 
mind is more alert, their judgment sounder." With 
regard to his fellow-countrymen, "an indiscreet 
nation," he criticises, among other failings, their 
bellicose temper: "Put down three Frenchmen 
amid the deserts of Libya, they will not remain for 
a month together, without molesting and scratching 
each other." In his Diary of Travel, it is evident 
that the very favourable judgments he passed on the 
nations he visited were mingled with some little 
contempt for his own country, "which he hated so 
that his heart rose against it." But he was enthu- 
siastic with regard to Paris, which he criticised only 
for the rank smell of its mud, as he did Venice for 
that of its marshes. It is quite a modern writer 
who sings this hymn to the glory of Paris : — 

"I am never so angry with France but that I 
look upon Paris with a kindly eye. Paris has pos- 
sessed my heart since my childhood, and like other 
excellent things, has retained its hold on me ever 
since. The more beautiful towns I have seen since 
then, the more strongly the beauty of this one has 



MONTAIGNE 115 

established its claim to my affection; I love it for 
itself, and more in its own being than when over- 
laden with external pomp ; I love it tenderly, even 
in its warts and blemishes ; I am French only through 
this great town, great by its people, great by the 
happiness of its situation, great especially and be- 
yond compare by the variety and diversity of its 
conveniences : it is the glory of France and one of 
the most noble ornaments of the world. God protect 
it from our quarrels and divisions ! . . ." 

Even the method of reasoning practised by Mon- 
taigne is, in some respects, animated by a spirit 
which is new. In the marshalling of his thoughts 
he is not so wayward and devoid of order as one 
might think. Nearly always, as he proceeds, he 
founds himself on facts, — facts of every kind, it is 
true, which are not all authentic, which he has not 
observed for himself, and the responsibility for which 
he lays on the shoulders of the writers from whom 
he borrows them; but after all it is on facts, his- 
torical or not, which his erudition provides him with 
in plenty, that he founds his reflections and con- 
clusions. This is already in a sense the method of 
Bacon. Montaigne does not proceed by deduction, 
according to the geometrical method which will 
be that of Descartes ; but he observes, and proceeds 
by induction, before ever Bacon had advised this 



116 MONTAIGNE 

course. The Essays have been called the Preface 
to the Instauratio magna. 

It is especially himself that Montaigne observes, 
and he may be considered as the inspirer of that 
introspective psychology which takes for its aim the 
analysis of self, and for its means interior observa- 
tion ; that psychology which was long held in honour 
by French philosophers, and which, in spite of its 
shortcomings, has been of such advantage for the 
knowledge of human nature. He has analyzed 
most acutely the failings of memory. He has spoken 
in happy terms of the relation between the soul and 
the feelings: "The soul is touched very lightly and 
so to speak glided over by the gentle impressions of 
the senses." Nor is he blind to the difficulties of 
this process of interior reflection. 

"It is," he said, "a thorny undertaking to follow 
such a vagabond as our mind, to reach the opaque 
depths of its inner recesses, to select and catch hold 
of the light air- waves of its motions." 

But he added, "If there is no description equally 
difficult, there is none either that is of such utility." 
He devoted himself to it entirely, towards the end 
of his life: "For several years I have had myself 
only as the object of my thoughts." To justify 
himself, he quoted the example of Socrates: "Is 
there aught that Socrates deals with at greater length 



MONTAIGNE 117 

than with himself?" Like the Greek philosopher, 
he esteemed other sciences as worthy of esteem 
only "in the service of life," and therefore looked 
upon the knowledge of Self as the most important 
of all. 

There is scarcely a pedagogical question on which 
Montaigne had not a word to say, a word that hits 
the mark, and is modern in sense. 

The boarding system he condemns unhesitatingly : 
"I will not have this boy imprisoned. . . ." 

The overworking of scholars, which in our days 
has been written about so largely, he denounces 
severely : — 

"I would not corrupt the child's mind by keeping 
him cramped at his work for fourteen or fifteen 
hours a day, like a porter. ..." 

Excessive mental work, an indiscreet application 
to study, a rash thirst for knowledge, all these, 
according to Montaigne, lead simply to dulness, 
stupidity, or insanity. 

"There is nothing so charming as the little chil- 
dren of France, but they generally disappoint the 
hopes that had been founded on them. I have 
heard people of understanding assert that these 
colleges, to which they are sent, besot them thus." 

On the subject of the study of modern languages, 
Montaigne was three centuries in advance of us. 



118 MONTAIGNE 

However, it is through travel, and residence abroad, 
that he would foster this branch of education : — 

"We should begin to take our scholar about from 
his earliest youth, and start with those neighbouring 
nations the language of which is most different from 
our own (there is little doubt that this refers to 
Germany), and which the tongue cannot accommo- 
date itself to, unless it be trained early." 

The "direct method" which we apply to-day, 
and which consists in learning languages less through 
grammar than through practice and conversation, 
was recommended by Montaigne even for Latin. 

"Active" methods, which demand reflection on 
the part of the pupil, have found in our time no more 
zealous advocate. 

We require at the present day that some ethical 
teaching should be given early, and introduce into 
the fourth and third classes x an elementary and 
familiar course on the duties of man. Montaigne 
Was already in favour of this. 

We live in a busy century, when every one is in 
a hurry to elbow his way to the front. It was 
already thus in the days of Montaigne, who would 
not allow his pupil to labour too long at books. Life 

1 The "quatrieme" and "troisieme" of a French lycee cor- 
respond approximately to the third and fourth forms, respec- 
tively, of an English public school. (Translator's note.) 



MONTAIGNE 119 

is short, he says, and he complains that the en- 
trance of young men upon active careers is delayed 
too long. "They are not put to work early enough." 
Too large a share of life is given to " idleness and 
apprenticeship." 

"Our child is in a hurry: only the first fifteen 
or sixteen years of his life should be devoted to 
pedagogic training; the remainder should be given 
to action. . . ." 

We think of organizing, for the moral and social 
education of youth, public holidays and celebra- 
tions ; here again Montaigne was an initiator : — 

"Good governments are careful to assemble 
the citizens, and to marshal them, not only for 
solemn services of worship, but also for drill and for 
games. ..." 

And the result, he says, will be this happy con- 
sequence, that "the society and friendship of men 
will be increased." 

Though in education Montaigne is an innovator, 
and at times an extremely bold one, in politics 
he is the most timorous of conservatives. Do not 
suggest to him that any changes might be made 
in established custom, whatever evil he may think 
of it. He has no love for revolutions, and he looks 
upon any theoretical discussion on the best form 
of government as a futile academic exercise. 



120 MONTAIGNE 

"We are fond of finding fault with our present 
condition; and yet I hold that it is vice and folly 
to desire the rule of a few, in a popular State; or, 
under a monarchy, some other form of govern- 
ment." 

Ah! no doubt, if all present conditions were 
first swept away, if an ideal city were to be built 
on new ground, "in a new world," Montaigne would 
have some " picture of a policy" to propose, some 
plan of government, different from that which he 
supports, without denying, be it said, either its 
abuses or its vices. But we are face to face with 
a world "already made, and formed to certain 
customs." To try and reform it would be, to begin 
with, more or less impossible. 

"Whatever means we be allowed in order to 
straighten it and reorganize it, we can hardly hope 
to twist it out of its accustomed folds. . . ." 

And if a revolution were possible, is it certain 
that the State would benefit? Montaigne is a 
conservative especially because he despairs of 
achieving anything better. 

"All great changes shake the State and intro- 
duce disorder. . . . The movements of humanity 
cannot better its lot. . . . Good does not neces- 
sarily succeed evil ; another evil may take its place." 

Just as in religion Montaigne the sceptic, the 



MONTAIGNE 121 

rationalist, concludes in favour of obedience to 
Catholicism, so in politics, dissatisfied though he 
is, he advocates respect for the established order 
of things; and he endeavours to comfort the impa- 
tient spirits who clamour for reform and wish to 
save the country from the evils which it is suffer- 
ing: 

"Our polity is in evil plight: others have been 
in worse, without dying. ..." 

Montaigne, then, is a conservative. But it some- 
times happens that this conservative speaks a 
revolutionary language. Or at least he takes note, 
without protest, of the bold reflections uttered by 
strangers, notable Americans, on certain institu- 
tions of the European states, such as hereditary 
kingship, or the unequal distribution of wealth. 
He was at Rouen, towards 1565, with Charles IX. 
There the youthful king had occasion to receive 
three natives of Brazil, and he conversed with them 
for a long time. They were asked what, among 
the French uses and customs, had surprised them 
most. Among other things, they answered that 
what seemed to them very strange, was that "so 
many big-bearded men, strong and well-armed, 
should submit to obey a child. ..." They had 
been even more surprised to find among the French 
"men filled and gorged with all kinds of comforts," 



122 MONTAIGNE 

while some of their fellow-beings " stood begging 
at their gates, wasted by hunger and poverty"; 
they could not understand how " these poor people 
could suffer such injustice, why they did not seize 
the others by the throat, or set their houses on 
fire. . . ." 

Montaigne is not so much absorbed in the study 
of antiquity as to forget to open his eyes not only 
to the present, but to the future of modern societies 
and of the whole of humanity. He was acquainted 
with the Capitol and its plan before he had seen the 
Louvre, with the Tiber before he had seen the Seine ; 
but that does not prevent him from giving his 
attention, with a passionate curiosity, to the ques- 
tions of discovery and conquest in the New World. 
Thus, after a pompous description of popular holi- 
days at Rome, he carries us without transition 
to the other shore of the Atlantic : — 

"Our world has recently discovered another, not 
less extensive, less filled, less large-limbed, and yet so 
new and so childish that it is still being taught its 
a b c. ..." x 

And he proceeds to foretell the future destinies 
of that child- world; he seems to have a foreboding 
of its rapid development, and also of the damage 
it will do one day to the older world : — 

1 Essays, Book III, Chap. VI. 



MONTAIGNE 123 

"This other world will just be beginning to shine 
when ours is growing dim ; the universe will be smit- 
ten with the palsy ; one of its limbs will be numbed, 
and the other in its full vigour." 

Does not the prodigious intensity of life of the 
United States partly justify Montaigne's predictions? 
He was amazed at the "awful magnificence of the 
towns of Cuzco and Mexico." What would he have 
said of the colossal growth of the cities of New York 
and Chicago ? 

Meanwhile Montaigne complains, with eloquent 
anger, of the conduct of the Spaniards in their 
barbarous conquests. He would have wished to 
see the populations of America, which had no other 
care but "to spend life happily and pleasantly," 
in the hands of peaceful and gentle civilizers, and 
not in the grip of greedy conquerors, intent on their 
prey. And, always filled with admiration for an- 
tiquity, he exclaims : — 

"What a pity that so noble a conquest did not 
fall to the lot of Alexander, or of those ancient 
Greeks and Romans ! . . . They would have gently 
smoothed and polished the savage nature of these 
peoples; they would have established between 
them and ourselves a brotherly intercourse and 
understanding. On the contrary, what have we 
seen? So many towns levelled to the ground, so 



124 MONTAIGNE 

many nations exterminated, so many millions of 
people cut down with the sword, and the richest and 
most beautiful part of the world thrown into con- 
fusion for the sake of a trade in pearls and pepper ! " 
In the contemplation of those American tribes, 
who lived peacefully under natural laws, before their 
oppressors came and taught them the ways, institu- 
tions, and vices of civilization, Montaigne, the thor- 
oughly civilized Montaigne, allows himself some Uto- 
pian day-dreams. He goes so far as to regret, as 
a lost golden age, the savage life of primitive peo- 
ples. One of the passages in which he dwells on 
his fancies has been copied by Shakespeare. The 
English poet had read the Essays in the translation 
published by Florio in 1601. 1 Thereupon a French 
critic imagined, somewhat rashly, that Montaigne 
had exercised on Shakespeare's mind a profound 
influence. 2 According to him, the reading of the 
Essays considerably modified the character of 
Shakespeare's dramatic output after 1603, by intro- 
ducing into his dramas a new philosophy. Julius 
C&sar, Ha?nlet, Coriolanus, according to him, are 

1 The copy of Florio' s translation, with marginal notes by 
Shakespeare, is in the British Museum. It was even declared 
that an autograph of Shakespeare had been found in it, but the 
document appears to be a forgery. 

2 Cf. an article by Philarete Chasles, in the Journal des Dcbats 
(October, 1846). 



MONTAIGNE 125 

full of Montaigne. Those are very bold affirma- 
tions. All that is certain is that the author of 
The Tempest put into the mouth of one of his char- 
acters, shipwrecked with a few companions in mis- 
fortune on a desert island, a tirade textually borrowed 
from Montaigne: — 

"Gonzalo: F the commonwealth I would by 
contraries 
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic 
Would I admit; no name of magistrate; 
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, 
And use of service, none; contract, succession, 
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; 
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; 
No occupation ; all men idle, all ; 
And women too," etc. 1 

Montaigne happened to write, once, in a moment 
of ill-humour, "the vulgar rabble. . . ." He must 
not, however, be taken for an aristocrat who de- 
spises the people. He knows what virtues the stout 
hearts of the people may conceal. Of one of the 
Three Good Women whose story he tells, he says that 
she was of humble extraction, and that "among 
those of that condition it is nothing new to meet 
with instance of rare kindness." Nurtured at first 

1 The Tempest (1612), Act II, Sc. I. Cf. Essays, Book I, Chap. 
XXX. We italicize the words which are textually borrowed 
from Montaigne. 



126 MONTAIGNE 

in a humble village home, with common peasants 
for his godfather and godmother, he never ceased 
to " devote himself to the lowly." He was a coun- 
try gentleman, and if he took little interest in agri- 
culture, of which he had not the remotest notion, 
he at least sympathized with the farmers. The 
peasantry, he used to say, in their manner of life and 
conversation, are better " regulated" than philoso- 
phers. 

"Let us look down at the poor people whom we 
see scattered on the ground, bending low over 
their work : they know nothing of Aristotle or Cato, 
of example or precept; yet Nature draws from 
them every day feats of constancy and of patience 
which are both purer and harder to perform than 
those which we study so diligently at school." 

Sometimes, escaping from his royalist traditions, 
Montaigne declares that "the supremacy of the 
people appears to him most natural and most 
equitable." Equality was, in his eyes, "the founda- 
tion of equity." He was not lacking in fraternal 
compassion for the humble; he showed it by shel- 
tering in his castle little beggars, whom he tried 
to rescue from beggary and poverty, and who, for 
that matter, once clad and fed, bolted, as later on 
the little vagabonds will do whom Pestalozzi has 
gathered off the highways. 



MONTAIGNE 127 

The theologians of Rome reproached Montaigne, 
among other things, with his use and abuse of the 
word "fortune," because he thus sacrificed Provi- 
dence, the Divine will, in the government of human 
affairs, to force of circumstances, fate, or chance. 
Modern philosophy levels the same reproach at 
him, but for other reasons. Montaigne had not 
sufficient faith in the power of the will, in the effects 
of human reflection. He does not feel clearly enough 
that it is man who can be, if he chooses, the artisan 
of his own destiny. He looks upon "fortune," 
that is to say, everything that is independent of the 
human will, as the true ruler over this world. ' ' Luck 
and ill luck," he says, "are sovereign powers." 

We must not, however, allow it to be said that the 
exercise of the will was unknown to Montaigne. 
A volition is, in its essence, only a strong thought, 
and who would dream of denying that he had 
strong and virile thoughts? Some one went the 
length of saying of the Essays that by the admira- 
tion and reverence which Montaigne professes for 
heroes of all ages, they were in a sense a school for 
the will. 

Montaigne would have been surprised, I think, 
if some one could have foretold to him the extra- 
ordinary success which the future had in store for 
the Essays, — editions innumerable, translations into 



128 MONTAIGNE 

foreign languages, as many readers as there are 
people in the world with a taste for letters. He 
would have been delighted as well as surprised: 
for we must not take him at his word when he affects 
indifference and contempt for glory. He admits 
occasionally that praise was agreeable to him, 
whatever quarter it came from. If he put Mile, 
de Gournay very high among the remarkable per- 
sons of his age, the esteem in which he held her 
was largely due to the touching devotion shown 
to him by this young lady, whose mind, after all, 
was not above the average, but who acted as a 
harbinger of his future renown. We must not take 
him at his word when he speaks of the " nihility" 
of his works, and professes to be a man "of the 
common clay." Insincere in this respect, with his 
feigned modesty, he knew himself too well, he had 
too unerring a judgment, not to be conscious of his 
own merit. 

Had it been vouchsafed to him to know the appre- 
ciations — in their extreme diversity — of the crowd 
of commentators who have fastened on the Essays, 
he would have been flattered by their praise, and at 
heart grieved by their criticisms. But he would have 
been even more amused by their contradictions. He 
would have taken pleasure in gathering from their 
contrary affirmations new arguments for scoffing at 



MONTAIGNE 129 

the uncertainty of human judgment, and for pointing 
to the difficulty of adopting settled opinions. And 
without pretending to imitate his marvellous style, 
— only a La Bruyere could make the attempt, 1 — 
this is perhaps the tenor, if not the form, of some of 
the reflections which would have occurred to him 
while reading his critics : — 

"I see," he would have thought, "that, in spite 
of the long succession of years, the inconstancy of 
human opinions has not changed within the last 
three hundred years: they still fluctuate and vary. 
Here, for instance, is one of your great ministers 
of education, Guizot, who has extolled me to the 
skies and loaded me with praise which I should 
never have dared to aspire to in my most presump- 
tuous moods. Yes, but here is something calcu- 
lated to humble my pride, if I could feel any; for 
what do I read in the work of Guillaume Guizot, the 
son, I think, of my panegyrist ? That I committed 
'the mistake of putting forth as a programme 
my own personal education, which came to noth- 
ing. . . .' This is rather hard on me, and I appeal 
from the son to the father. Was my education such 
a total failure? 

'What else does this severe critic say? That I 

1 Cf . La Bruyere's "pastiche" of Montaigne in the Characters, 
Chap. V : Of Society and Conversation. 



130 MONTAIGNE 

sketched 'a plan of education for a gentleman of 
high standing, according to the recollections of a 
spoilt child. . . .' I, a 'spoilt child'? Why, you 
forget that I was brought up in a village, roughly, 
like a rustic; that I was trained to the humblest 
and commonest manner of living, to frugality and 
austerity; that if peradventure my life did not 
conform to the habits of my early youth, the fault 
lay, not with the education which I had received, 
but with my own inclinations. You forget that I 
was left in this poor village so long as I was at nurse, 
and even after that; and that later, when I was 
hardly six years of age, I was shut up in the 'College 
de Guyenne/ in a jail for captive youth. It was said 
to be the best school in France, with excellent 
teachers, at least two of whom, Buchanan and 
Muret, have remained famous; but still, it was a 
school, and caresses were few. 

" It is true that my excellent father, the best that 
ever was, when he kept me near him, dealt with me 
in a mild and free manner, exempt from any rigorous 
subjection, wishing to train my soul in all gentle- 
ness and liberty ; but it was only when I was at home 
that I enjoyed this liberty, and until the age of thir- 
teen I was scarcely ever at Montaigne except in 
holiday time. 

"It is true also that, on my return from nurse, 



MONTAIGNE 131 

my father wrapped me up in the tenderest solici- 
tude, carried to such a superstitious excess that he 
Was careful to have me wakened by the sound of 
some musical instrument, lest my brain should be in- 
jured by too sudden an awakening. Wherein perhaps 
lies the reason that I never loved music, having had 
a surfeit of what I was given to taste prematurely. 

"Socrates, who spoke much of himself, as I also 
have done, said of the dialogues of Plato, if we are 
to believe tradition: 'How many fine things that 
young man makes me say, which I never thought 
of ! ' I might say likewise of some of my historians 
that they have discovered in me qualities, and 
perhaps also faults, of which I was unaware. And 
yet, God knows how I studied and watched myself 
throughout my life, how I observed my inner self 
and meditated on it ! Thus I learn from Mr. Grim 1 
that I was an economist. That is going beyond the 
truth, though it is a fact that during my municipal 
administration I advocated freedom of trade, and 
did what I could to turn the citizens of Bordeaux 
away from politics by directing their activity towards 
commerce. Others have said that I was a philolo- 
gist, because I wrote the chapter on Chargers. . . . 

"Some have complained that I was over-com- 
municative. But when I read all the works which 

1 M. Griin, Vie publique de Montaigne. 



132 MONTAIGNE 

patient scholars accumulate on my memory, I find 
that I had not told everything. How touching 
to behold, three centuries after my death, men of 
the nineteenth century labouring with such perse- 
verance to elucidate the obscure points of my life, 
ferreting right and left ! Should I not be particularly 
grateful to Dr. Payen, who spent over twenty years 
rummaging in every nook and cranny of my life 
and work ? He became smitten with a real passion 
for me. Yes, his love for me was equal to that of 
my dear 'daughter of alliance,' Mile, de Gournay. 
And to how many others do I not owe thanks? 
They have studied even the arm-chair in which I 
sat in my library, and which Was rediscovered in 
the attics of the castle of Montaigne. 1 I never sat 
in it for long ; my mind slept when my legs were not 
in motion; and in this respect, I, who frequented 
every philosophic sect of antiquity, was a faithful 
follower of the peripatetic sect, whose disciples 
studied as they walked. 

"But among all those who have recently busied 
themselves with me, there are two in particular, 
whom I distinguish, and put by themselves. Firstly, 
Mr. Champion, who deserves this credit, that he 
read my work from beginning to end, without tiring 

1 Cf. the print entitled le Fauteuil de Montaigne, by M. G61y, 
Perigueux, 1865. 



MONTAIGNE 133 

of my prolixity and self-repetition. Among my 
critics are there many who could say as much? 
No doubt, I could debate with him the question 
whether, as he believes, I several times modified my 
way of thinking, and went through several phases; 
whether, as he declares, two souls cohabited within 
me ; whether, in short, there was, as people say to- 
day, an evolution in my character and my thought. 
But this discussion would lead us too far, and I shall 
merely refer Mr. Champion to one of the men who 
have analyzed the spirit of the Essays with most 
insight, to Sainte-Beuve, who is willing to admit 
that, after all, 'there was some unity in my ideas.' 
I have expressly stated that my judgment, almost 
from my birth, was one; and that with regard to 
universal opinions, I took up from my childhood 
the standpoint which I was to adhere to. And with 
all due respect to Mr. Champion, there is one point 
on which he is certainly mistaken; never, at any 
time of my life, did I give way to ' violent party 
spirit and to a sort of fanaticism.' 

"The other is Mr. Emile Faguet. He has under- 
stood me. I can almost see lurking about his lips 
the ironical smile that used to play on my own. 
He is the true heir to my thought, and if he had 
lived in my time, I would have made him my 'son 
of alliance,' the brother of Mile, de Gournay. 



134 MONTAIGNE 

"Not that he deals so very tenderly with me. 
He is much more inclined to severity. But that is 
not to be wondered at, since he is undertaking to 
criticise me. When I went over my own works, I 
used to feel out of temper with myself. Mr. Faguet 
maintains, for instance, that I will teach children 
nothing ; at least, little or nothing. And yet did I 
not write, appropriating one of Plutarch's thoughts : 
'What should children learn? What they need to 
know to grow into men'? And again, is it fair to 
say that in the government of children, I believed 
in a laisser faire policy, and even in allowing them 
to do nothing? Because I have confessed that I 
had no taste for tedious work, should it be inferred 
that I ever advised against work, against attractive 
work, founded on affection and willing interest? 
And have not your best pedagogists reached the 
same conclusion ? Do they not also recommend that 
the child's attention be engaged by making his 
work pleasurable? 

"To judge fairly of a man, you must take his 
circumstances into account, you must apply to him 
what is now called the theory of environment. 
Before the century in which I lived, there had been 
an abuse of vain and barren science, bristling with 
thorns and briers. Perhaps I inclined somewhat 
too complacently in the opposite direction, towards 



MONTAIGNE 135 

easy and pleasant study. There had been also 
an abuse of harsh discipline, against which it was 
necessary to react. Perhaps if I had lived in a 
time like yours, when there is a complaint of general 
'slackness/ I should have shown myself firmer and 
more severe. That is what Mr. Faguet has clearly 
understood, when he observes that I was addressing 
men who were lacking in just those faculties of 
moderation. I inclined a little, and perhaps a 
little too far, on the side towards which they had no 
inclination whatever. 

"He is also deserving of praise for not always 
taking me seriously. I wrote the Essays only to 
occupy my hours of loneliness, for my own amuse- 
ment. But what pleases me especially is that he 
has defended me, after some others, against that 
reproach of scepticism which has fastened on my 
name like a legend. Ah ! I often harboured doubts, 
to be sure ! I put away from me, with all my might, 
both prejudice and superstition. But on many a 
point I had faith, and a firm faith. I had faith in 
justice, not in human justice, which is often most 
unjust and iniquitous, but in essential, natural, and 
universal justice. I believed in tolerance, and 
practised it. And most of all, I believed in the 
obligation to seek and to tell the truth. Truth is 
so great a thing that we should scorn no undertaking 



136 MONTAIGNE 

that can lead us towards it. To speak the truth 
is the very foundation of virtue. Truth should be 
loved for its own sake. And it is no doubt because 
I loved truth that in spite of a few censors who have 
jeered at me, I have met with many readers who 
have esteemed and loved me." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Besides the chapter entitled Of the Institution and Educa- 
tion of Children, Bk. I, Ch. XXV, one should consult, in the 
Essays, other chapters in which Montaigne also speaks his 
mind on the subject of Education: Bk. I, Ch. XXIV, Of 
Pedantry; Bk. I, Ch. XXII, Of Custom; — Bk. II, Ch. VIII, 
Of the Affection of Fathers for their Children; Bk. II, Ch. XXXI, 
Of Anger; Bk. Ill, Ch. Ill, Of Three Commerces or Societies; 
Bk. Ill, Ch. VIII, Of the Art of Conferring; Bk. Ill, Ch. XIII, 
Of Experience, etc. 

The editions of Montaigne are extremely numerous ; we shall 
only quote the more important. Montaigne published during his 
lifetime two editions: the first, in 1580, at Bordeaux, in 2 vols.; 
this edition includes only the first two Books; the second, 
in 15SS, Paris, 1 vol. ; the latter included a third Book and six 
hundred additions to the first two. Mile, de Gournay next pub- 
lished two editions of the Essays, one in 1595, revised and in- 
creased by a third more than in the preceding editions, from notes 
written by Montaigne during the last four years of his life; 
the other in 1635, in which the original text is often altered. 

Edition by Coste, London, 1724, often reprinted. 

Edition of 1802, published from a copy of the 1588 edition, 
preserved at Bordeaux, and which Montaigne had again filled 
with notes. 

Edition of J. V. Le Clerc, 1826, reprinted in 1863, with a 
Preface by Prevost-Paradol, 4 vols, in 8vo. This edition has 
become classical, and we have followed it in our quotations. 

Variorum edition of Charles Louandre, 4 vols, in 12mo, Paris, 
1862. 

137 



138 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Edition of Dezeimeris and Barkhausen, 2 vols., text of 1580, 
the first two Books only, Bordeaux, 1870. 

Edition of Combet and Royet, 4 vols., Paris, 1870. 

Edition of Motheau and Jouaust, text of 1588, 7 vols., Paris, 
1886. 

It would be out of the question to enumerate here all the 
critical and historical works which Montaigne has inspired. 
We shall mention only the more recent and interesting. 

Conort, Etude sur Montaigne et ses doctrines pedagogiques, 
in the Revue pedagogique, 1880-1881. 

Mme. Jules Favre, Montaigne, moraliste et pedagogue, Paris, 
1887. 

Paul Stapfer, Montaigne, in the collection : Les grands 
Ecrivains francais, Paris, 1895. 

Paul Stapfer, La Famille et les Amis de Montaigne, Paris, 
1896. 

Guillaume Guizot, Montaigne, Etudes et Fragments, Paris, 
1899. 

Paul Bonnefon, Montaigne, V Homme et VCEuvre, Paris, 
1899. 

Edme Champion, Introduction aux Essais de Montaigne, 
Paris, 1900. 

Among the literary historians who have dealt at some length 
with Montaigne, we may quote : — 
Felix Hemon, Cours de Litterature. 
E. Faguet, Seizieme Steele, Etudes litteraires, Paris, 1894. 

Various special editions have been given of the chapter on 
the Institution and Education of Children. 

E. Reaume, Rabelais et Montaigne pedagogues, Paris, 1886. 

F. Hemon, De VInstitution des Enfants, Paris, 1888. 

G. Compayre, De VInstitution des Enfants, Paris, 1888. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 139 

Bibliography for English Readers 1 

The standard translations of Montaigne's Essays into English 
are those of John Florio (1603) and of C. Cotton (1683), the 
former of which, in spite of many errors on points of detail, 
perhaps most closely approximates to the spirit and style of 
the original. 

These translations have frequently been reprinted and edited. 
Serviceable editions are the following : — 

Cotton's translation, edited by W. C. Hazlitt, 3 vols. 

Florio's translation, edited by Professor H. Morley, with 
introduction and glossary. 

Florio's translation, edited by J. H. McCarthy, 2 vols. 

Editions of selected essays are also numerous, one of the 
best being perhaps that in Blackie's Red Letter Library, with 
an introduction and notes by Charles Whibley. The translation 
is Florio's in modern spelling, and the fifteen essays given 
include that on the Institution and Education of Children. 

The following are among the most noteworthy studies on 
Montaigne which have appeared in English : — 

R. W. Emerson, Montaigne, the Sceptic (in Representative Men) . 

Rev. W. L. Collins, Montaigne (Blackwood's Foreign Clas- 
sics for English Readers) . 

Mark Pattison, Life of Montaigne (in his Essays, edited 
by Professor H. Nettleship). 

George Saintsbury, Article Montaigne in the Encyclo- 
paedia Britannica. 

See also : — 

DR. D. Nasmith, Makers of Modern Thought. 

Sainte-Beuve, Essays, translated by Elisabeth Lee. 

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Horae Sabbaticce, Series I. 

1 Compiled by the Translator. 



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